


The Press Of Your Lips Has Left Frost On My Heart

by leonidaslion



Series: Suite!verse [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-08
Updated: 2011-04-08
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:30:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the Morning After, and Dean's giving Denial another go ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alykayt](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=alykayt).



> [Art](http://charlie-d-blue.livejournal.com/9415.html) by charlie-d-blue  
> [More Art](http://charlie-d-blue.livejournal.com/13379.html) by charlie-d-blue  
> [Art + Fanmix](http://abendiboo.livejournal.com/13726.html") by abendiboo
> 
> [Vid](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyyQMBKWG3I) by loverstar  
> [Trailer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWxN30zvGw8) by loverstar  
> [Vid 2](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJmC3R8PME4&feature=related) by loverstar
> 
> [Audiofic](http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/category/seriessuiteverse) by juice817

The fire is still burning when Dean finally drags himself out of bed around one o’clock in the afternoon. He stands there for a few minutes, one hand on the runneled surface of the wall, and looks at the wreckage of the suite. An odd, ruddied glow lies over everything, making both the room and his own existence in it seem unreal.

The dreamlike haze that clings to his skin like smoke is due, in part, to the fact that he’s too exhausted to make sense of what he’s seeing. His thoughts drag, muddled and ponderous from the weight of yesterday’s ordeals. Although he refuses to let himself think about _(inside me)_ what happened after Sam left to put out the flames, the effort of keeping his mind on other things is even more exhausting than the lack of sleep.

Sam has been gone for hours now, but Dean can still feel his brother pressed up against him. Sam slept deep and still at first, but in the early watches of the morning he woke and his hands began to wander. As though storing up memories to last him through the day, he left butterfly-light touches across Dean’s bare chest and stomach and side. He spent almost an hour laying lingering, open-mouthed kisses along the curve of Dean’s neck and shoulder, with just the barest scrape of teeth when he finally pulled away and got out of the bed.

Standing here now, Dean is having trouble distinguishing between the memory of those touches and the anticipation tingling through his nerve endings.

After all, it’s morning—or as close to morning as Dean comes lately—and morning means Sam stepping up behind him and slinging an arm around his stomach as he pulls him close and whispers a low, caramel-thick greeting in his ear. It means Sam turning him around and spending what feels like hours licking and biting at his lips: begging for entry in a ravenous, worshipful way that always makes Dean’s groin pull tight and his stomach tremble.

Every morning, Dean thinks to himself that he should be running, or fighting, or doing _anything_ but standing there and taking it, but he never does. That first morning after his disastrous escape attempt, he _did_ try to run. Sam didn’t even blink: he just wrapped Dean tight in a humming cocoon of power and held him still, which set the tattoo on his back tingling and made everything even worse.

Dean hasn’t tried running since.

Inevitably, of course, Sam will get tired of asking and part Dean’s lips for him with the slow press of his tongue. What comes next isn’t so much kissing as it is fucking: the friction of Sam’s lips on his and the thrusting of Sam’s tongue in his mouth and the vibrations of Sam’s moans down his throat. The insinuating pressure of it all builds until Dean’s head is reeling and his morning wood isn’t just annoying but agonizing. Then, finally, Sam will release him and Dean will be able to escape to the bathroom for a few minutes of clean, un-Sam-scented air.

But although Dean’s skin tingles with the expected brush of his brother’s fingertips, none of that is going to happen today. It isn’t going to happen because for the first time in months Sam is gone.

With that fact firmly centered in his mind, Dean tries to tell his body to stand down. He can’t figure out how to make himself settle, though.

It makes him think of the year he turned nine, which also happened to be the same year Dad decided to ramp up his training. Those first few mornings, Dean complained bitterly about the pre-dawn sprints and the countless push-ups and sit-ups before breakfast. On the third day, Dad gave him a stern look and told him to suck it up for just one month and it wouldn’t bother him any more. After one month of PT, the exhausting, aching torment that he was putting his body through would become routine.

Dad was right then, and his words aren’t any less true now: as sternly as Dean tells himself that Sam isn’t here, the anticipation of his brother’s touch still lingers on his skin like condensation on the side of a glass. Sam’s morning greeting has had more than just a month to become routine, and now it’s habit: a pattern of breath and fingers and lips that has worn grooves into Dean’s mind and body.

Looking for something to distract himself from the distressed signals his body is sending, Dean moves his eyes over the twisted remnants of the suite. He needs some small measure of relief from the pressure of yesterday’s memories against the inside of his skull, and he finds it in the form of the gaping hole in the outer wall. Drawn by the reddened maw, he wanders over to stand in front of the blown-out picture window and looks down on a smoke-clogged world.

Parts of the inferno have already burned out, although Central Park is still impossibly aflame. Dean has no idea what’s feeding the blaze at this point, although he suspects that it might be using the air itself as fuel. Low-hanging, black clouds make it impossible to see very far, but before the sun sets tonight, he thinks that it might have cleared up enough for him to see whether anything is left of the MET.

Not that he gives a fuck anymore.

Toying absently with the cuff on his right wrist, Dean edges up to the rim and looks down. The street below is no longer asphalt, but glass: first melted and then baked to a high shine by the continuous lick of flames. As the fire shifts, the bones of the cars that were parked along the curbs in neat rows flicker in and out of view like ghosts. This close to the open air, whatever ward Sam uses to control the suite’s temperature isn’t working as well, and sweat beads on Dean’s bare skin, making him shiver.

Fire is pretty high up there on Dean’s list of Ways Not to Die, but the suite is on the top floor and there’s plenty of space between him and the lingering flames below. No matter what kind of protections Sam has woven into his body, a fall from this height is bound to kill him instantly. Dean won’t have time to feel his flesh begin to burn before the blissful darkness folds around him. Before everything is silenced.

 _Oh God, please,_ he thinks, yearning, and leans forward.

He isn’t terribly surprised by the wall of power that holds him safely back—Sam isn’t that stupid: of course he isn’t—but the ache in his chest sharpens anyway, cutting fresh wounds. Dean’s breath punches out in a strange, sobbing laugh and he digs his fingers into the barrier that isn’t there: digs in hard, as though he can claw his way to freedom. His fingers slick-slide off a wall of air as solid and as smooth as the glass it replaced, and after a moment he drops his forehead and shuts his eyes, stilling himself.

The pads of his fingers feel hot—partially from the fire outside, but partially from friction—and when Dean is calm enough to open his eyes again, he finds his fingertips red and raw. A few more moments of thoughtless, pointless scrabbling and he would have scraped them bloody.

A memory bubbles up to the surface of his mind: not one of yesterday’s forbidden events, but bad enough nonetheless. In it, Sam is holding Dean like he weighs no more than a pile of blankets. Sam’s power caresses Dean’s insides. Sam’s nose nudges against the corner of Dean’s jaw.

 _‘If you hurt yourself again,’_ Sam threatens, _‘for any reason …’_

Dean regards his fingers as his thoughts limp around the memory. He wonders dully if that would have counted: if Sam would have come home and looked at Dean’s bloodied fingertips and followed through with his promise. As his mind wakes a little, he blinks and his heart gives a belated kick of panic.

It isn’t difficult to imagine what would have happened if the answer to that question is ‘yes’. Dean has seen more than enough terrified kids in his time and he can picture them easily now: children too young to understand what’s happening but frightened nonetheless, tears streaking their faces as they’re herded into the suite by Sam.

 _No,_ he corrects himself, pressing his fingers more firmly against the invisible, unyielding wall before him. _Not by Sam._

Sam would delegate that task to a member of his demonic fan club. He’d be too preoccupied with Dean to do it himself: too busy ensuring that Dean understood what was about to happen, and why.

Dean senses another thought, moist and pale and horrible, worming its way to the surface. Biting his lower lip, he fights against it. His head pulses painfully with the effort, and he realizes almost immediately that it’s too much: he can hold back his memories of yesterday or he can burn the terrible, squirming thought out at the root, but he can’t do both.

Gritting his teeth, he relents and the thought bursts free. Dean's eyes open painfully wide as he shoves himself back from the ruined window. His heart flutters against his ribcage like a panicked bird.

Even if injuring his fingers wouldn’t have been enough to provoke Sam, then jumping out the window the way he wanted to—the way he _tried_ to—definitely would.

Oh Jesus, oh fucking _Christ_ , is that _attempt_ going to count?

Dean has no way of knowing the answer to that question, of course. Sam’s behavior has been unpredictable at best lately, and after yesterday _(fuck you, I’m not thinking about that)_ , he can’t even begin to imagine how his brother would react to that bit of information. ‘Not well’ probably wouldn’t even begin to cover it, though.

 _He isn’t here,_ Dean tells himself. _He doesn’t know._

As though more distance will erase the slip, he backs further away from the gap.

Dean doesn’t believe himself, is the thing, because Sam seems to know everything these days. Even if he missed the moment of disobedience itself, Sam is going to take one look at Dean when he gets back and read the guilt in his expression. And if Dean somehow manages to cling to his poker face, Sam can just pluck the memory out of his head anytime he wants. If he misses it today, then there’s always tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, and this isn’t the type of offense that comes with a statute of limitations.

Fuck, Dean wasn’t thinking. He was just … he was letting himself drift—letting himself _want_ —and that one, selfish moment is going to buy some little kid _(more, Sam isn’t gonna stop at just one, not for something like this)_ a slow, agonizing death.

“No,” he breathes. A pulse of dizziness washes over him and when he can see again, he’s on his knees. He doesn’t know how he got there, but his legs are trembling with hot, weak floods and his heart is racing. Running his hands over his face, he grips his hair harshly and bows forward.

The suite constricts, closing in on him from all sides and pushing the air out. Dean gasps and gets a lungfull of nothing for his trouble. He bends further, forehead on the carpet, and it smells burnt, it smells like sulfur and decay, and he can’t _breathe_ , God, he’s going to die here and it isn’t going to be his fault but Sam’s going to take it out on everyone else anyway, just little kids and he’s going to tear _(help)_ through them like tissue paper, he’s going to dig deep _(Sammy please)_ furrows in their bodies like a tractor’s blades in soft, yielding earth, _(Sam)_ and oh God, Dean _can’t_.

Darkness.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Dean opens his eyes again, his head aches. His skin feels chilled, but he’s sweating: hair damp at the nape of his neck. The warped, partially melted walls have receded back where they belong, thank God, and Dean is breathing easily. After several minutes of staring at his own outstretched fingers, he struggles up onto his hands and knees.

It isn’t too difficult to figure out what happened.

“I fainted,” he tells the carpet. His voice sounds strange in the silent room—too loud, too rough—and he frowns. “I blacked out,” he corrects himself. As broken as he might be these days, he’s still a Winchester and Winchesters don’t fucking _faint_.

“Panic attack,” he adds, and then rubs at his back of his neck. “Fuck.”

He’s had them before, of course, but Sam has always been there to stop them before they progressed too far. Every time things have gotten just a shade too hellish, Sam’s power has washed through him: soothing the fear and the unbearable agony of this wolf trap of a suite away. With an unpleasant shock, Dean remembers that he tried to call for Sam just before the world went dark. He tried to call for his brother because he wanted Sam to come and replace the panic with numbing pleasure: wanted it the same way that a junky wants his next fix.

Anger threads through him—not at Sam, but at himself. He’s supposed to be stronger than this, damn it. He _was_ stronger than this just yesterday, was stronger until Sam—

Dean shuts down on that thought before it can go anywhere.

As he kneels there, doing his best not to think about anything, it eventually dawns on him that he’s still waiting for Sam. He’s waiting for his little brother to show up and rescue him from his own, lurching thoughts. Dean spent the last few months praying for Sam to give him just a few minutes to himself, and now that he finally has what he prayed for, Sam is all he can think about. All he wants.

“Make up your fucking mind,” Dean growls. The irony of his conflicted, shifting desires curls his lips into a bitter smile. Moments later, the smile fades into a grim, determined expression.

Dean got off to a bad start today—who wouldn’t, after what _(don’t fucking think)_ happened yesterday _(about it, moron)_ —but that doesn’t mean he can’t come back from it. He has an opportunity here—he has a chance to think without Sam twisting everything round on itself: maybe to find a way out of this goddamn prison—and he isn’t going to waste it.

It takes a ludicrous amount of effort to get to his feet, and when Dean finally manages it, he sways perilously. He’s still dizzy from hyperventilating himself unconscious and his legs tremble as he makes his first shuffling step. When he doesn’t fall, confidence gives him the strength to lengthen his stride, and a moment later he’s resting a hand on the back of the couch, which is back in its normal position and oddly undamaged by _(sam)_ whatever hit the rest of the suite.

Breakfast is laid out on what looks like a new coffee table _(the other one pretty much disintegrated yesterday when—when nothing. nothing fucking happened)_ and Dean finds himself mesmerized by the covered dishes. Even though it’s now early afternoon, he knows that the eggs and bacon beneath those silver lids will still be warm, and the fruit slices and juice will be chilled. There will be a piece of pie: cherry or apple or peach. Because Sam wants him comfortable. Sam wants him happy.

Dean stares at those fancy silver covers and his stomach turns over.

Focusing all of his attention on making his legs work properly, he moves around the couch and heads into the bathroom. It’s better in here; the tiles are shattered in places and there’s a crack running through the mirror _(is that new? dean can’t remember and doesn’t want to)_ , but the destruction is at least rational. There are no half-melted walls to hurt his mind: no warped, bubbled bits of floor that should never exist outside of an acid trip. In the bathroom’s relative calm, the horrible sluggishness of his thoughts lifts slightly.

For the first time, Dean is aware that he feels like crap. His muscles are sore from holding so still all night in an attempt to keep Sam first asleep and then happy, and his skin itches with old layers of sweat. But the feeling goes deeper than that. For some reason _(open up baby)_ , Dean feels dirty inside—he feels fucking _filthy_ —and although he doesn’t actually think that a little hot water and some soap is going to do any good, he has to try.

He pushes his underwear down around his ankles and then steps forward. Leaving the discarded fabric to lie on the tiles like a shed snakeskin, he heads over to the shower and turns on the water. Within moments, the flow is hot enough that steam rises from the floor in pitiful parody of the inferno outside.

Wary after his earlier mistake, Dean sticks his right arm beneath the spray and makes sure that he isn’t going to scald himself. The water temperature verges on painful and turns his forearm an alarming shade of red, and it still isn’t hot enough: skinny-dipping in a volcano wouldn’t be enough to burn the taint _(this is happening dean)_ from his skin. If he turns the water up any higher, though, he’s going to burn himself, and he’s already killed enough kids today.

Dean hisses when steps under the spray: breath shoved from his lungs by the sudden shock of heat. His muscles twitch and he instinctively flinches away from the water. Then he remembers what he’s doing and holds himself still while his body gets used to the temperature.

He watches the water pound down on his chest and belly and then run from his legs onto the ceramic floor of the shower, where it swirls down the drain just as clear as it came out of the showerhead. After a moment, he frowns. The water should be soiled. There should be _(yellow)_ some visible sign of dirt there, but there’s nothing.

 _You didn’t think this was actually going to work, remember?_ Dean reminds himself, and that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t hoping. He’s getting used to the sting of disappointment, though, and it passes mostly unnoticed.

When the water finally feels comfortable, Dean takes the bar of soap from the alcove in the shower wall and lathers up his hands. He tries not to think of his brother as he washes himself—of Sam’s hands on his chest, on his stomach: Sam’s hands always threatening to go lower, threatening _(come for me baby)_ to slip inside of him and begin the business of opening him up—but he can still feel Sam’s touch in the wake of his own fingers.

Desperate to replace the phantom press of Sam’s hands with Sammy’s, Dean hunts through his mind for better memories. The water is too distracting; he keeps on winding up back in the tub with Sam’s body pressed close behind him and Sam’s hand grasping his cock. Those fragmented images summon up the even worse memory of Sam’s power shining a searchlight on Dean’s battered soul: of Sam forcing him to face up to his own, pathetic weakness.

“Goddamn it!” Dean yells abruptly, hurling the soap across the room. It hits the cracked wall and leaves behind a filmy, uneven mark at the site of impact. Dean stares at the splotch, not sure whether he’s angry or frightened or just really fucking bitter, and then climbs out and retrieves the bar. Careful of the slick puddles he’s leaving on the floor, he returns to the shower and goes back to work.

This time, he tries scrubbing at his skin with just a shade more force than is actually comfortable. The roughness does the trick, chasing away Sam’s presence, and Dean relaxes a little. He cleans his front as thoroughly as he can and then hesitates, eyeing the curls of black edging his hips.

Even on normal days, he doesn’t like touching the tattoo. Although that branded skin doesn’t feel any different from the rest of him, there’s too much of Sam there: it’s too strong a reminder that he doesn’t really belong to himself anymore. Too strong a reminder that his brother—his Sammy—is dead.

Today, there’s a nagging prickle of unease running down his spine. Sam isn’t here to funnel power through the black lines, but Dean is still afraid. Those outlying, black curves seem to leer at him: untrustworthy.

He considers leaving his back alone, but that soiled, crawling sensation is strong within him _(God it is, it’s_ inside _me)_ , and as frightened as Dean is by the prospect of touching Sam’s mark, he’s also driven by an almost pathological need to _try_. After all, there’s always the chance that this time he’ll be able to wash it off. It’s a slim chance, sure, but hope springs eternal, or whatever.

Tentatively, he brushes one hand over the black line on his right hip and then jerks it away again. Shivering and resisting the urge to put his fist through the tiles, he leans against the side of the shower. When he’s steady enough to straighten, he moves back beneath the full force of the spray. Then, before he can chicken out, he offers up a fervent prayer that he was just hallucinating and trails his fingertips back over the outer edge of the tattoo.

This time, the spike of sensation is strong enough that it buckles his knees. Dean catches himself before he actually falls, bracing himself against the wall with one hand while echoes of his brother’s power stretch languidly through him. Squeezing his eyes shut, he rests his forehead on his outstretched arm and waits for the feeling to fade.

This—whatever it is—is new, and he knows instinctively that it has something to do with yesterday. He wants to be angry. He wants to be furious that Sam is doing this to him: that Sam is claiming him one piece at a time whether Dean wants him to or not. But he’s tired, and there’s this untouchable core of cold inside of him, and all he can work himself up to is a healthy dose of despair.

He’s deep behind enemy lines, wounded and delirious, and night is coming. Night is coming for him, and it isn’t bringing anything as kind as death, and it sure as fuck isn’t bringing rescue. Why would it? He walked himself here, didn’t he? Hell, he’s the one who handed the enemy the tanks and the AK-47s and the fucking nuclear warhead, and somewhere beneath all the horror and the denial and the last, dragging remnants of his anger, Dean knows that he deserves what’s happening to him.

Slowly, he clambers out of his own mind and bits and pieces of the shower come back in. Flash of chipped tile. Bead of water on one of the hairs on his forearm. Bar of soap resting against the instep of his right foot. He focuses in on the bar, considering.

 _No_ , a tiny, terrified voice whispers in his mind. _No, don’t. You don’t have to: no one’s making you._

For a long moment, Dean doesn’t respond. Then his lip curls. _Fuck you,_ he thinks back and bends to retrieve the bar. His hands are trembling badly enough that it takes him four tries to get hold of the soap, but once he has it he doesn’t waste any more time.

Lathering up, he shoves the bar back into its alcove and then reaches behind him and drags his hands across his back. The bloom of Sam’s power unfolds within him like desert heat, and Dean isn’t sure whether it’s causing him pleasure or pain. It doesn’t matter. He’s not letting Sam dictate what parts of his own body he can and can’t touch.

Clenching his jaw, Dean washes himself with brisk but thorough movements. It takes him less than a minute, but by the time he’s finished Sam’s power is sliding around inside of him: wide awake and purring. Dean can hear his heartbeat in his own head, and his cock is hanging heavy and full between his legs, which seems to answer the ‘pain or pleasure’ question, except for how it doesn’t. If this is pleasure, then it’s a punishing sort: unbearably strong and too intimate.

He can smell Sam. He can feel the phantom warmth of his brother’s touch underneath his skin.

Dean snaps his shoulders back as though he can shrug the illusion away and the power redoubles in intensity, lapping up against his insides in a flood. Suddenly, it feels like his brother is here with him—not the twisted, golden-eyed mockery that Dean has to live with now, but _Sammy_. Power thrums inside of him and Sammy’s ghost wraps strong arms around Dean’s chest. It whispers reassurances in his ear: _just a little longer, baby, you’re doing so good, gotta be strong for me._

It’s the cruelest kind of lie, and Dean slaps both hands sharply against the wall. That warmth and those words carve out his insides, leaving him horribly hollow. Hanging his head, he weeps silently and prays for the feeling to fade.

After several wretched minutes, the insubstantial arms finally drift away from him and his brother’s voice silences. Sam’s power is still moving through Dean, though: unsated. Thick coils of heat settle in his groin, forcing his breath out in a hurt moan. He desperately needs to wrap a hand around his cock and get a little release, but damned if he’s going to touch himself with Sam’s claim awake and strong within him. For all he knows, this is some kind of psychic trap his brother laid for him: some way to trick Dean into handing over even more of himself to Sam than he already has.

The power pulses, insistent, and Dean widens his stance. The sound that spills out of him this time isn’t so much a moan but a whimper.

Hearing his own voice making such a desperate noise ignites a small, flickering flame of anger in Dean’s chest. He squares his shoulders, resolute, and pushes away from the wall. Glaring at the showerhead, he fumbles to his left until his hand closes on the bottle of shampoo.

Dean takes his time washing his hair: concentrating on the comforting push and pull of his own fingers against his scalp and on the strong, honey-sweet scent of the shampoo. He turns, presenting his back to the scalding water, and the tattoo gradually settles. It takes almost five power-empty minutes for his libido to get the message that he isn’t going to do anything about the painful erection he’s sporting, and then his desire fades to a dull, disappointed ache.

By now, Dean has been in the water long enough that his fingertips are white and pruned. He doesn’t feel any cleaner than when he started—feels maybe a little worse—but if the water and the soap haven’t done anything yet then they aren’t going to. Turning off the shower, he steps out onto the tiled floor and retrieves one of the oversized towels hanging on the far wall.

Dean's arms and legs are stone heavy as he dries himself off: he feels like he just went through three back-to-back sessions of Dad’s PT. His thoughts are once more limping and exhaustion encroaches on him like a low, rolling bank of fog. He’s seriously considering going back to bed.

Yeah, he just got up, but it isn’t like he actually got any sleep last night. It might be a good idea to take a nap now so that he isn’t among the walking dead when his brother comes back. Dealing with Sam is difficult enough when Dean’s mind is working at full capacity: right now he’d probably get someone else’s throat slit in under a minute.

But if Dean sleeps, then he’s going to dream. He knows from experience that he can’t control his thoughts in his dreams: he can’t keep his memories chained and gagged. If he goes to sleep now, then he won’t be able to stop himself from remembering _(i want to see you taste him)_ all of those things that didn’t _(i don’t share dean)_ happen yesterday.

No, better to stay awake. Maybe he can watch a movie … except that he seems to remember noticing earlier that the TV is little more than a pile of glass shards and melted plastic. He knows how it got that way, of course, or he would if he let himself. He can feel the knowledge whispering around the edges of his thoughts.

 _Exercise,_ he tells himself quickly.

For a distraction, it’s a pretty decent idea. After all, just because Dean doesn’t need to work out in order to stay in shape anymore, there’s no reason he has to fall off his game. He hasn’t done anything in a couple of months—mostly because he could feel Sam’s eyes on him every time he tried to do more than a couple of sit-ups—but now he has a chance to lose himself in the push and pull of muscle and flesh and bone without feeling like he’s on display.

Dropping the towel on the floor, Dean starts for the main room and then stops as he catches a flash of his reflection in the mirror. His mind continues to scramble for the door, but for some reason Dean is turning toward the mirror instead. As his thoughts work through a series of self-defense drills, he watches himself step up to its cracked surface. He feels himself curl his fingers around the edge of the sink.

He did this yesterday. Twice. Once after Sam left to deal with the fire and then again later, when he searched his eyes for a hint of gold.

Later, when he saw what Sam had done to him briefly reflected in his irises.

The wall of willful denial, already stretched bubble thin, finally bursts and everything floods out at once: Sam’s hand around his cock, Sam laying the yellow-eyed demon’s _(and Dean’s)_ cheek open to the bone with a thought, Sam ripping that noxious cloud of power from the son of a bitch and forcing it inside Dean’s mouth—inside his soul.

That last memory hits Dean with an actual physical force and he jerks. His legs give out for the second time in less than two hours, dropping him to the floor. He’s too stunned and horrified to consider resisting the fall and his knees make a cringe-worthy crack when they hit. No way he’s coming out of that without bruises at the very least, which means that he has damaged _(Sam’s property)_ himself for sure this time, but Dean is too absorbed in a wash of revulsion and horror to panic about that.

 _It’s inside me,_ he thinks, staring at the faucets that are suddenly at eye-level. _Fucker’s inside me._

His stomach clenches and then tries to crawl up his throat and out of his mouth. Dean hasn’t eaten recently enough to throw up, but he can dry heave, and he does so again and again until it _hurts_ —until he’s positive that he’s bleeding internally—and still he can’t get anything to come up but a thin, burning string of bile.

It’s funny, really, because he wanted to throw up yesterday and couldn’t get his body to remember how. Now, as useless as the action is, he can’t seem to stop. His eyes water with the force of the retching, but he isn’t crying, although there’s an unbearable pressure building behind his eye sockets. This latest violation is just too big—too overwhelming—to be expressed in any sane way. Dean keeps looking for a way to let the swelling, sickened betrayal out and bumping up against smooth, solid walls.

Finally, it slips out sideways in a laugh. The noise sounds like a malformed cross between a sob and scream, horrifying, and that only makes him laugh harder. Dean laughs in between his pathetic attempts to puke and his gasps for breath until he confuses his body into hiccupping, and when he tries to hiccup and hurl at the same moment, the cramping of his throat muscles is painful enough that he’s shocked into silence.

Shaking, he lets his mouth hang open and watches his breath fog the polished edge of the counter. He waits for the panic and the nausea and the shame and the guilt and the rage to surge back into place, but there’s nothing more alarming than an intense, relentless ache throbbing in his chest and stomach.

From some distant part of the hotel, Dean hears a faint scream that is almost instantly cut off. He isn’t a fool—knows that there are demons here, and people, and that there are bad things happening on the floors below—but this is the first time that he has ever had any clear evidence of that sort of thing. He has the hole in the outer wall to thank, probably: it must be weakening Sam’s soundproofing.

Letting out a ragged exhale, Dean drags one hand across his mouth and then rests his forehead against the lip of the counter. _Goddamn it,_ Sam, he thinks, but the words are more weary than angry.

After a few minutes of silence, he hauls himself up to his feet: wincing as his knees unbend. He glances down long enough to note that he hasn’t cut himself, at least, and then looks back at the mirror. His reflection looks back, glassy-eyed and vacant.

Dean’s taint isn’t visible, not really, but now that he remembers it’s there, he thinks that he can feel it inside of him: waiting. He fumbles against the wall of power that Sam erected in his mind, searching for cracks and praying that he won’t find any. For now, at least, his prayer is answered. He can feel Sam, but not the demon: not that noxious cloud.

As Dean eyes his reflection, the cold, martial part of him—Dad’s good soldier—assesses his condition with brutal honesty. His stomach aches from his violent attempts to puke. His limbs tremble like a newborn colt’s. And yeah, he’s sickened. He’s been violated in the worst way imaginable, and Sam—his _brother_ , whom he loves more than he should: way more than is healthy or sane—did this to him. Of course he’s fucking sickened.

He just isn’t sickened enough.

Dean should be curled up in a fetal position right now. He should be smashing his fist into the mirror and grabbing a shard of glass and slitting his throat and to hell with the kids who will suffer for his escape. He should be hyperventilating himself into another blackout at the very least.

Maybe a violation of this magnitude is just too much for Dean to process at once. Maybe this is his mind working without his knowledge to space his meltdowns out over a period of time so that he doesn’t come apart at the seams. Hell, maybe he’s somehow preventing himself from really _feeling_ because he knows that he won’t be able to come back from complete and utter understanding, and he knows what Sam will do if he returns to find Dean catatonic, or with his hands slashed and bloodied from repeatedly punching the mirror.

But even if those things are true _(and they are, at least in part)_ , they aren’t the entire story.

The ugly, sorry core of the matter is that he’s adjusting. His body is already well-trained enough that he missed Sam’s touch when he got up, and now he’s moderating his emotional and mental responses for his brother as well. He’s cutting his own gut reactions off at the pass in order to keep Sam happy.

All this time, he’s been under the delusion that Sam has been dragging him closer and closer to the rabbit hole, when really he’s already deep inside and halfway to Wonderland.

 _It’s this thing inside me,_ Dean tells himself as he turns on the water. _It’s changing me. Tainting me. That’s all._

But he knows that it’s a lie. After all, Sam locked that glowing, golden heat away where Dean can’t touch it and can’t be touched in return. Dean hasn’t changed. Only his self-awareness has altered: sharpened. Without the numbing brush of Sam’s power, Dean is thinking more clearly than he has in months and he doesn’t like what he sees.

 _I’m slipping,_ he thinks, splashing his face with water. He’s too burnt out to feel anything more than a faint, dulled pulse of regret. Ironically enough, his lack of fear at that prospect is what finally shocks him into a cold sweat.

Oh God, Dean can’t do this by himself anymore. He isn’t smart enough or strong enough to stand firm in the face of Sam’s relentless pushing. He needs help. He needs … he needs _Bobby_. Bobby will know what to do. He’ll know how to stop Dean’s descent: how to tear the demon’s power out of him, and clean Sam’s mark from his skin.

But in order to get to Bobby, Dean needs to submit to his brother.

He shuts his eyes and stares into the darkness for a long time. When he has his breathing under control again and his knees are starting to go stiff, he nods. His forehead brushes the mirror with the motion.

“Fine,” he rasps. “Fucking fine.”

Anything to see another human being again. Anything for a chance to be reminded of what things are supposed to look like in his head, instead of what Sam _wants_ things to look like. Anything for a friendly smile, or a clap on the shoulder.

Anything.

He’s still naked from his shower, and as ready as he’s ever going to get, so he doesn’t have to do anything but walk back out into the main room, where he kneels in front of the main door.

Dean waits.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time the door opens, Dean has been kneeling in the dark for hours: the fire finally guttered out sometime around dusk. He has lost track of the number of times his legs have cramped up on him, but it’s been often enough that he doesn't think he'll be able to stand on his own. The only sensation left below his waist is a faint, persistent tingle in his thighs, and even that is fading. As he lifts his eyes to his brother, he wonders if the numbness will hold long enough that he won’t have to feel any of it.

Probably not. He doesn’t have that kind of luck.

Sam stands in the doorway: a faceless shadow backlit by light from the hallway. Then power rushes into the room, ruffling Dean’s hair, and a gold flare of light spreads across the ceiling. Dean blinks owlishly at the sudden brilliance but doesn’t lower his head. When his eyes have finally adjusted almost a full minute later, his brother still hasn’t moved.

In the new, power-driven illumination, Dean sees that Sam isn’t bloodied. There’s a strong scent of sulfur in the air, though, and a single streak of ash smudges his brother’s cheekbone. The cuffs of Sam's sleeves are singed.

Sam looks back at Dean: watching him in that still, intent way that owls watch mice. Tiny gold specks are reflected in his pupils, but for the first time there’s no warmth in that gaze. Dean didn’t know that the gold sheen of his brother’s eyes could turn so cold. His shoulders jerk in a half-restrained shiver and Sam’s jaw works at the movement.

After a moment, he says in a soft, dangerous voice, “What the fuck is this?”

Dean can hear the warning in his brother’s tone, but he’s past caring. “You win,” he says. “Whatever you want, okay?” His voice doesn’t waver at all. He sounds broken—worse, he sounds defeated—but he doesn’t really care about that either.

Sam looks at him for another minute and then steps inside and shuts the door. Dean can’t help but flinch a little at the sound: looks like he isn’t quite as resigned to this as he thought he was. Dropping his eyes so that Sam won’t be able to read the dread there, he watches his brother’s legs come closer and closer until he can feel Sam’s body heat. Until that sulfur scent is curling in his mouth: obscene.

Oh God, he’s gonna throw up again. He’s gonna try, anyway. But then he thinks of Bobby, of the possibility of finding a way out of this clusterfuck, and his stomach steadies. He doesn’t so much as twitch when Sam slips two fingers beneath his chin and tilts his face up.

Sam’s eyes are warmer now—not much, but a little—and Dean’s pulse slows as he drops his head further back. Terror and disgust float on top of his mind like froth on milk, but underneath he’s calm, and some part of him is even a little eager. If Sam smiles at him, that part will surge forward and Dean will be lost: as helpless to resist his brother’s pull as the tides are to resist the moon.

But Sam doesn’t smile. Intent, he traces his eyes over Dean’s face and rubs his thumb against Dean’s lips. The command is implicit and obvious, and without thinking Dean opens his mouth wide enough for his brother to edge his thumb inside.

Sam tastes like salt and sunlight, but underneath those innocuous flavors Dean catches an undercurrent of smoke that makes him want to gag. Jarred out of himself, he hesitates. Then Bobby’s homely face intrudes, half-concealed by a worn cap, and he screws up his courage and sucks Sam’s thumb deeper.

Keeping his eyes open and on his brother’s face, Dean curls his tongue around the digit. It’s been a while since he had to work to seduce anyone, and never Sam, but apparently seduction is kind of like doing a shot: once you figure out how to manage the trick, you never forget. Dean assumes he’s doing all right, anyway, because something flickers deep within Sam’s eyes as Dean’s tongue slides along his thumb.

When Sam pushes deeper, testing, Dean lets him. His brother presses a second finger after the first, and Dean takes that as well: alternating between sucking and licking the way he knows Sam likes.

By the time his brother finally pulls his fingers free, Dean is shaking. He licked away that tainted, smoky flavor several minutes ago, and since then there has been nothing but Sam: nothing but the familiar, loved taste of his brother’s flesh. Dean did his best to keep the now and the then separated in his mind, but he’s tired and his body is confused.

Despite yesterday’s betrayal, his groin aches. His cock juts forward at an angry, obvious angle. He’s aroused and so goddamned ashamed of that fact that he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from throwing up all over both of them. Casting his gaze down and to the side, he waits for Sam to tell him how he wants him.

Sam is silent long enough that Dean has to dig his nails into his thighs to keep from bolting—or from trying to bolt: after being stuck in the same position for so long, his legs probably won't be very cooperative. When his brother’s voice finally comes, it’s flat with disappointment.

“I don’t want a whore.”

Dean’s breath punches out at the words and he hunches forward. Sam doesn’t say anything else, and he doesn’t touch Dean again. He just detours around him and heads deeper into the suite.

Dean doesn’t understand. He was—he was offering himself of his own free will, just like Sam wanted, and Sam—he just—

That son of a bitch.

With expected difficulty, Dean clambers to his feet and hobbles after his brother. Walking is torturous as his legs tingle and twitch and come back on line, but the prickling sensation isn’t anything compared to the hours of dread and self-loathing that he just endured.

And for what? So Sam could _turn him down?_

Sam is standing at the bathroom sink, splashing water across his forehead and cheeks and then dribbling it over the back of his neck. Dean doesn’t even hesitate. He just stumbles right up to his brother and shoves his shoulder.

“What the fuck?” he shouts. “This is what you wanted! You’ve been pushing for it for fucking _months_!” He has hold of Sam’s shirt now, shaking him while he yells, and he realizes that he’s amping himself up for a punch. Good. He’s gonna knock Sam’s head clean off.

“Let go of me,” Sam says quietly.

“You son of a bitch! What the fuck do you _want_?”

As Dean draws his arm back, Sam’s eyes snap up to his face and narrow. An instant later, power slams into him, shoving him back against the wall and pinning him there. His brother follows before he can drag in a breath, tangling a hand in his hair so that he can’t look away.

“I want _you_!” Sam yells. He’s furious: power leaking everywhere and making the walls creak in protest. The sink gives a solitary, abused groan and then collapses with a crash of ceramic dust, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice.

“Then fucking take me!” Dean snarls. “I told you: you want me, you can have me. Just do it already, for fuck’s sake.”

“You don’t want me, Dean. You want out.”

“So?” Dean demands. “Come on, fuck me. I’ll give you whatever you want.” He strains against his brother’s power and manages to twitch his hips forward. The force of Sam’s will strengthens immediately, stilling him, but he figures he made his point.

“It’s not enough,” Sam tells him.

“’Not enough’?” Dean repeats incredulously. “I’m begging you to fuck me and it’s not enough?”

“No.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because you don’t want it,” Sam hisses. Ice snaps in his eyes: vicious. “When you come to me because you love me—because you want to show me how much you love me—then I’ll fuck you until you can’t remember there’s anything outside this room. Until your entire world is just this—” His hand cups Dean’s wilting erection, fingertips resting lightly on his balls. “Just me.”

And Dean gets it.

“No,” he whispers as Sam releases him and steps back. The power caging him loosens, and he slumps weakly but doesn’t try to get away. Something vital appears to have broken inside his chest. “No,” he repeats. “You can’t—Sam, that’s never—I can’t _make_ myself love you.”

“I know you can’t. It’ll happen. I can wait.”

Sam bends down to pick up a towel—the same one Dean dropped earlier—and uses it to dry his face. Stunned, Dean watches his brother toss the damp towel onto the remains of the sink. Water is spilling out onto the floor from the broken pipes, but at a glance from Sam, the flow dies down to a trickle.

“I’m having pizza brought up in a few minutes,” he announces as he cards his fingers through his hair. “You can either stay in here or you can get dressed and come out into the other room. One or the other, Dean: I don’t want to have to blind another servant because you’re having an off day.”

Dean doesn’t know what to say to that, but Sam doesn’t actually seem to want a response. He turns and strides into the main room without a backward glance, leaving Dean alone in the ruined bathroom.

Slowly, Dean sinks down the wall and draws his knees in to his chest. Then he curls forward, buries his face against his legs and shakes. He can smell soap—Sam’s choice—and shampoo—Sam again—and suddenly he’s crying.

Jesus Christ, he doesn’t even smell like himself anymore. He smells like honey and roses, he smells like a fucking _girl_ , and beneath that he smells like Sam.

Dean loses track of time while he sits there, but eventually another scent intrudes on his misery: pizza. He shouldn’t be hungry, not after the spectacular way the last few days have gone, but his stomach rumbles anyway. Now that he considers it, he can’t actually remember the last time he ate. He wonders what it would feel like to starve to death: whether the hunger would fade eventually, whether it would hurt.

Then he remembers what Sam would do if he tried it and decides that he doesn’t want to find out.

Inevitably, thinking of his brother's established consequences leads to thoughts of his misstep earlier today. Dean glances at the door, heartbeat tripping over itself in his chest, and then swears underneath his breath. Sam's going to find out about it eventually, of course, but Dean intends to postpone that moment as long as possible. Which will be a few minutes from now if he can't manage to stop thinking about it.

Frowning in concentration, he files his mistake away next to his memories of being held _(open)_ down and corrupted in the mental folder labeled 'Don't Fucking Think About It, Asshole'. Dean has always been pretty good at denial and avoidance—sort of a natural talent of his—and this past year or so _(God, how long_ has _it been?)_ has only made him more practiced. Sure, the folder's getting a little full, and things keep falling out of it and tripping him up, but he's doing better than Sam would have if their positions were reversed.

Not that Dean ever would have done this to Sam, no matter how fucked up he was, but still.

Now that he feels steadier inside, Dean climbs to his feet and goes about the business of making himself presentable: blowing his nose and then taking the time to clean his face as best as he can with the leaking, choked flow of water from the bathtub faucet. Sam already knows he was sitting in here sobbing like a fucking pussy, of course, but that doesn’t mean that he has to look like it. Dean doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of dignity left these days, but he’s clinging to whatever shreds he can find like a rat to the last, rotting boards of a sinking ship. If Sam wants to take those tattered fragments away, then he's gonna have to rip them from Dean's mangled, broken fingers.

Letting out a shaky breath, Dean smoothes a hand through his hair and squares his shoulders. Then, after wrapping a clean towel around his waist, he steps out into the main room.

Sam is sitting on the couch, balancing a plate of pizza on one knee and tapping a pen against a map that’s unfolded across the coffee table. Although he must be aware of Dean’s emergence, he doesn’t glance up or acknowledge him in any way. The snub—and that’s what it is: Dean’s been on this side of his brother’s hissy fits often enough to recognize one when he sees one—hurts deep inside where it shouldn’t.

Dean should be glad that Sam isn’t cataloging his every move. He should be overjoyed that his brother isn’t bending him over that couch right now and fucking him _(don’t want a whore)_ hard enough and deep enough that he won’t be able to walk straight tomorrow. Instead, he feels lonely and guilty and shamed.

The place that Dean used to think was the best part of himself—the part that only knows how to love Sam—is all but shouting at him that he needs to toss himself at his brother’s feet and beg for forgiveness. It’s ludicrous and he knows it—Sam fucking raped his soul yesterday: he doesn’t get to take the moral high ground here—but that particular switch is welded in the ‘on’ position. Dean can’t force himself to stop caring about his brother any more than he was able to jump out the window.

No matter how much better it would be for everyone concerned if he could manage either.

 _Spilled milk,_ Dean thinks, rubbing at his aching chest with one hand, and then makes his way over to the warped wardrobe.

He picks out the loosest t-shirt he can find and, after looking for his sweats and coming up empty handed, a pair of boxers. They don’t offer a whole lot of protection, but judging from his brother’s mood, that isn’t going to be an issue tonight. Besides, they're more comfortable than any of his other options.

Dean half expects Sam to play dress up with him again _(not that one the blue)_ but the oppressive silence remains unbroken. After a moment of hesitation, he brings the clothes back into the bathroom. He feels kind of like an idiot doing it—he was just hard and naked under the full press of Sam’s eyes: what’s a few seconds of nudity when his brother isn’t even looking at him?—but that doesn’t stop him from relaxing slightly once he’s safely in the bathroom again and there’s a closed door between him and Sam’s anger.

He feels better when he’s finally clothed: not great, but not quite so fragile anymore either. Not so defeated. His stomach rumbles again, insistent, and this time when he emerges from the bathroom it’s in search of food.

There are two pizza boxes on the coffee table next to Sam’s map: one of them open and already half-empty. Dean hesitates for a moment longer—he doesn’t really want to get that close to his brother so soon after their confrontation in the bathroom—but his stomach feels like it’s going to start trying to digest itself any minute now, and the pizza smells really fucking good.

Painfully aware of how nervous he must look, he makes his way over to the coffee table. Sam is busy scribbling something on the map in that incomprehensible scrawl of his, though, and doesn’t look up at Dean’s approach.

As Dean comes to a stop by the table, his brother drops his pen and lifts a slice of pizza from the plate on his knee. Sam takes a bite and then puts the slice back down, fastidiously licking his fingers clean before turning his attention back to the map. His disregard is blatant enough that Dean’s skin actually feels chilled, and he rubs his own fingers together in a vain attempt to warm them.

He wants to be grateful that Sam is ignoring him, but he can’t quite manage it. He’s too used to being the center of his brother’s attention, and the abrupt cold shoulder makes him feel anxious and guilty on the one hand, and absofuckinglutely terrified on the other.

Sam got like this with Dad sometimes, and it never took more than an hour or so for his rage to bubble over into a shouting match that usually ended with a brawl. Sam never quite dared to raise a hand to John Winchester, maybe because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop once he threw the first punch, but Dean was fair game. He ended up with more than his fair share of bruises that final, volatile year before Sam abandoned ship for Stanford.

Just imagining what that kind of explosion will look like now is terrifying, but Dean doesn’t know how to diffuse his brother’s temper before it goes that far: mostly because he doesn’t understand why Sam is so pissed. The red flicker of lightning around his brother’s fingertips—so reminiscent of yesterday’s fury—leaves no doubt to the fact that Sam is on the verge of an epic meltdown, but Dean can’t think of anything that could have pushed him this far. Not unless Sam knows about the incident with the blown-out window.

 _No,_ Dean reassures himself before he can start to panic. _If he knew, I’d be watching him redecorate the place in blood spatter._

He concentrates and manages to come up with a few things he could say that might cool his brother off a little: ‘I’m sorry,’ for one, and ‘I love you,’ for another. But they wouldn’t be true and Sam would be able to smell the lie on him.

Dean’s pretty sure that lying to Sam right now would only make things worse.

In the end, he takes a couple of slices and retreats without comment. He gets to the middle of the room and pauses, not sure what to do with himself. There weren’t a whole lot of pieces of furniture in here to begin with, and after Sam’s little display yesterday, pretty much everything but the couch and the bed is trashed. And no way in hell is Dean sitting next to his brother. That’d be about as smart as kicking a tiger and then shoving his hand inside its mouth.

Grimacing, he glances toward the bed.

Just two days ago, that was his safe place: his refuge. Now, the sheets are covered with Sam’s scent. Dean looks at the rumpled, bloodstained pillow and remembers pressing his head back into it in an attempt to evade the yellow cloud of the demon’s power. He looks at the twisted sheets and remembers being lost in a haze of lust: remembers Sam’s mouth on him, and Sam’s hands pulling an orgasm from his drugged, over stimulated body. He remembers how good that lesser taking was compared with the later one, which left him contaminated and unclean.

He can’t sit on that mattress and scarf down a couple slices like nothing happened. Actually, now that his violation is fresh in his mind again, Dean isn’t sure that he wants to eat at all. He looks down at the slices of pizza in his hands and his stomach gives a muted, unhappy gurgle.

“Eat the fucking pizza, Dean,” Sam says without turning around. His voice is a whiplash: stinging. The aura of power illuminating the room bleeds from gold to red.

Dean eats both slices standing up.

They taste like ashes.


	3. Chapter 3

Dean thought that nothing could be worse than having Sam constantly dancing attendance on him: constantly pushing until Dean’s heart has been twisted round on itself into some unrecognizable, mangled shape. He thought it couldn’t get any worse than being eroded one piece at a time by the consuming pull of his brother’s need.

Laying on the edge of the bed with his heart hammering in his chest and the air bled to red light all around him while Sam’s displeasure ruffles along his back like a cold wind?

This is worse.

There aren’t any clocks in the room, but Dean’s pretty sure that he’s been lying here for over three hours now. His mind is exhausted—not just limping, but dragging itself with painful, short lurches—but he’s too keyed up to let himself sleep. He keeps flinching at the occasional, distant screams that filter in through the hole in the wall, and he spends the intervals of silence with his muscles strung tight and aching in anticipation of his brother’s explosion.

Sam has never held out this long before: not when he was burning supernova cold with rage the way that he is now. He's never had so much power behind his punches, either, and Dean has no idea what to expect when his brother finally loses his grip on that iron control.

He’d bet his left lung that it isn’t going to be pretty, though.

The sound of Sam finally getting up from the couch makes Dean’s heart stutter. Although he strains to follow his brother’s progress, the room remains completely, eerily silent in the wake of that muted shift. Sam could be heading for the bathroom, or he could just be standing there staring at the place where the TV used to be, or he could be stalking closer. Fuck, he even could be standing at the other side of the bed staring at Dean’s back.

Dean grimaces as his muscles pull even tighter at the thought. He’s sweating and shivering and about two seconds away from having a heart attack.

“Dean,” Sam says from somewhere behind him.

Dean isn’t thinking straight enough to gauge his brother’s location from that lone whisper, but he isn’t so far gone that he doesn’t catch the warning _(threat)_ in the word. His muscles give a panicked clench that leaves his thighs and biceps spasming. It hurts—fuck, it hurts almost as bad as being electrocuted did—and despite his best intentions a whimper slips past his lips.

Sam’s power snaps out and settles over him in a thick sheet. For the first time, it’s impersonal. Cold.

“Stop it,” Sam orders. His voice is clipped and frosted: peppering Dean with ice. Dean’s skin pebbles as his breath punches out in a crystalline fog and then everything goes black.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When he wakes up again, the room is dark. Dean can tell that he wasn’t out for long because his muscles are still trembling and achy, and his skin feels chilled. That half-frozen, half-burnt taste of his brother’s fury is still thick in the air. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Sam decided to handle Dean’s latest panic attack by whammying him unconscious.

What Dean doesn’t know—and what he needs to find out before he works himself up again—is where his brother is now. It occurs to him that Sam could, quite literally, be anywhere. He can sense that his brother hasn’t gone far, though, which means that Sam is probably still somewhere in the suite—maybe lying right behind Dean with his eyes glittering in the darkness. Watching.

Resisting the impulse to jerk out of bed at the thought of his brother waiting so close, Dean carefully sits up instead. He’s alone in the bed, at least, but that doesn’t mean Sam isn’t watching him. Sweat trickles down the back of his neck as he inches up to sit with his back against the headboard.

Rubbing at his left bicep in an attempt to work out the last remaining tension, Dean scans the darkened room for any Sam-shaped shadows. Maybe he can’t actually do anything against his brother, but there’s being overpowered and then there’s rolling over and offering your throat.

Dean’s pretty sure that doing the latter tonight wouldn’t be such a hot idea.

With no Sam in sight, Dean has slowly begun to relax. Then his eyes catch on a thin sliver of light beneath the door leading to his brother’s study. The image takes him by surprise and he jerks as memory crashes through him.

Suddenly, Dean isn’t in the suite anymore. He isn’t even in New York. Instead, he was in Burkettsville, Louisiana, and he was twenty years old, and Sam was sixteen and pissed about the fact that they were moving again.

It was late—coming up on three a.m.—and they were leaving in just a couple of hours because Dad wanted to be gone before dawn. Dean should have been sleeping in preparation of the marathon drive, but instead he was creeping from his room into the apartment hallway. No matter how upset he was earlier, Sam had to be asleep by now, which meant that he’d never know if Dean popped his head in for a few seconds.

Not like he was actually concerned about the kid: he just wanted to make sure Sam was packed so that they wouldn’t lose an hour while Dad yelled at him. If Sam wasn’t—if he wanted to make some kind of point—then Dean would pack up for him, moving silently like Dad taught him, and that would fix that. The knife-thin slice of light coming from beneath his brother’s door was kind of tossing a wrench in that plan, though.

Hesitating in the hallway, Dean bit his lip. There was checking up on the status of your sleeping brother’s bags and then there was creeping into your brother’s room in the middle of the night when you knew he was awake. That sort of stupidity never led anywhere good.

 _What’re you doing?_ Dean asked himself as he moved forward again. _He’s up, and he isn’t gonna let you pack shit, so what the hell are you doing?_

The answer came as glibly as it did when he had to lie to Mrs. Jacobs at school about how he’d broken his arm: Dean was going to go in there for a few minutes and reason with Sam. He was going to explain why they had to move again, and he was going to get his kid brother to see Dad’s side of things for once.

Dean still believed that when he opened the door and found Sam sitting in the middle of his sagging mattress with his knees pulled up to his chest and tears on his cheeks. He believed it when Sam caught sight of him and scowled. Believed it when Sam was wiping his cheeks with shaking hands and hissing at Dean to “Get the fuck out! It’s still my room!” He believed it right up until the moment he was licking the salt from Sam’s cheeks and running his hands across his brother’s shaking body.

That was the first time that mattered: the first time that he couldn’t brush it off as a dream, or as nothing more serious than fooling around.

That was the first time that he looked into his brother’s eyes in the light, where neither one of them could pretend this was anything but what it was, and then kissed him anyway.

Dean shakes his head, dragging himself free from the memory, and then goes still. He doesn’t remember moving—doesn’t even remember getting out of the bed—but he’s standing in front of the study door with one hand on the knob. He stares at his hand, willing it to open, and can’t get the signal from his confused brain to his traitorous fingers.

 _This is a bad fucking idea,_ he tells himself, and knows that it’s true. It doesn’t matter, though: somewhere along the way all of his brain’s commands to turn around and get back in the bed are crashing headfirst into an impenetrable wall.

Caught in the adrenaline-fueled wasteland between fight and flight, Dean stands there and stares at the door. Fine tremors run through his fatigued muscles and his stomach feels like it’s been lined with molten lead. The feel of the knob against his palm is reminiscent of his lessons in fire safety, which John drilled into him from a young age. Instead of blistering heat, though, the metal is radiating glacial cold.

Dean really doesn’t want to go in there.

The memory of a sixteen-year-old Sammy, cheeks streaked with tears and eyes red, resurfaces in his mind and his throat works. “It’s not him,” he breathes, careful to keep his voice low. “It’s not. He fucking r-ra—he ra—”

Fuck, he can’t say it. He can’t say it when he’s standing here alone in the darkness of his ruined cage. His thoughts slide against the wall of Sam’s power in his mind and then shy away again. He swallows: can hear his throat work in the silence.

“He stuck that demon crap inside of you, asshole,” Dean chokes out finally. The reminder still doesn’t get his hand off of the knob.

Which means that concern for Sam isn’t actually his driving motivation here.

Dean takes a closer look at the emotions flooding him and, almost immediately, lets out a soft, self-deprecating laugh.

Sam is angry—maybe at Dean, maybe at someone else, maybe at the world—and Dean feels so guilty he’s bordering on nauseous. In part, that guilt stems from his failed attempt to dive out the window earlier today, but mostly it’s nothing but a continuation of an established pattern. Dean has always felt responsible for his brother in one way or another, and whether he’s actually at fault for Sam's mood this time or not, he can’t keep from reproaching himself.

Beneath the guilt—or possibly twined through it—is an anxiety born of loneliness. Dean misses Sam’s eyes on him: misses Sam’s whispered endearments. He misses that often suffocating, occasionally relieving, sensation of being wanted.

God, he’s so fucked.

Acknowledging his distress only makes him feel worse, of course: like a marksman peering through the sight of his rifle, Dean has focused in on the upsetting emotions and now they’re all he can see. Entering the study looks like an even worse idea than before, but Dean is acutely aware that he can’t do anything else. Not now. His nerves are gonna leave him bouncing off the fucking walls, and Sam is going to have to come out here and handle the situation, and this time he isn’t going to be level-headed enough to just send Dean to sleep.

Before he can think himself into a paralysis, Dean turns the knob. The door is unlocked, just the same as always, and he pulls it open and peers inside.

Sam’s study isn’t precisely off-limits, and Dean came in here often in the early days, when he was hunting for a way out, but that was months ago. Even in the midst of his apprehension, he’s surprised at how many changes his brother has made: thick cream carpets exchanged for red, another desk added against the far wall, books scattered everywhere in deceptively random piles. There are actual lamps in here, as well: antique, stained-glass things that probably would have cost a fortune Before.

Sam is sprawled in an oversized armchair by the window, head tilted back while he rubs at the bridge of his nose with one hand. There are dark circles under his eyes. He looks tired.

“Are you okay?” Dean asks without thinking. The belated reminder that he shouldn’t care about that anymore comes a moment later, but the question is already out there and he can’t take it back. Besides, it isn’t like Sam doesn’t already know that some of those feelings are still strong inside of him: lingering on with the tenacity of a coma patient.

Sam continues to massage the bridge of his nose for a moment and then lowers his hand and leans forward to retrieve a book. Without so much as glancing at Dean, he opens the tome and starts to read.

Dean stands in the doorway while his stomach twists in knots, listening to the staccato rhythm of his own heartbeat and waiting to be acknowledged. Eventually, he realizes with a slow, creeping horror that he isn’t going to be. Sam isn’t going to explode this time. Sam is just … he’s just going to disengage. He’s going to disengage the same way he did during those last few weeks before Stanford, when he devoted all of his energy to shutting Dean out of his life: out of his heart.

 _He wouldn’t,_ Dean tries to tell himself. _Not now. Not after everything he’s done._

But Sam keeps on not looking at him and Dean’s certainty in his brother’s devotion slips. The prospect that Sam _will_ stretches out before him—eternity trapped in this suite, ignored and shrinking in on himself and _fading_ until he’s nothing more than a ghost—and his lungs constrict with panic. He grabs the doorjamb with one hand, anchoring himself.

“Sammy,” he tries, voice cracking.

Sam turns a page in his book.

God, being ignored shouldn’t make Dean feel so terrible. It _shouldn’t_. But Sam has cut him off from the world. He took away everything Dean defined himself by—saving people, hunting things, his goddamned _car_ —and slapped a pair of manacles on his wrists and a tattoo onto his back and called it even. Sam pushed and pulled until he’s the only thing that Dean has, the only thing left to him, and now he’s taking that away as well.

“Please,” Dean manages. “I don’t—I don’t know what’s—what I did.” He hesitates, licking lips that are far too dry, and then forces the question out. “Are you mad at me?”

Sam finally looks up, and the fire in his eyes is still banked and cold.

“Mad at you?” he repeats, closing his book. “Why would I be mad at you, Dean?”

“I—I just thought—you seem—”

“I seem what?” Sam interrupts. His smile is warm on the surface, but winter lurks just beneath. “A little tense maybe? A little out of control? A little worn out from my day at the office?”

That last question is thrown at him like a knife, cutting, and Dean flinches. “S-Sam,” he starts, and then Sam hurls the book against the wall and surges up from the chair in one swift movement. He’s in Dean’s space before Dean even has time to blink.

Dean jerks back and runs into the doorframe with a grunt. Sam takes another step closer, power leaking everywhere and stealing the warmth from the air. Looks like he’s going to explode after all.

“I had this all sewed up, Dean!” Sam shouts. “It was over. No more ambushes, no more suicidal attempts to fight for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. But now I have to do it all over again. I have to wade up to my fucking neck in blood— _again_ —because you couldn’t wrap your goddamned head around the fact that you’re mine, and I’m never letting you go.”

Dean hasn’t made any motion to run—it hasn’t even crossed his mind as an option—but Sam’s power wraps around him anyway. He gasps as ice floods across his back and around his wrists. The cuffs snap his hands down and back, leaving his hands pinned at waist level on either side of the doorframe. Snarling, Sam grabs a fistful of Dean’s hair in each hand and yanks his head back at a painful angle.

“Not fucking ever, Dean!” he hisses. “You die and I’ll tear Heaven itself apart to get you back, you hear me? _Do you?_ ”

 _He knows,_ Dean thinks, terrified, and then Sam’s lips are on his.

Dean can actually taste his brother’s anger, biting and acidic, and people are going to die—little kids—but he’s so relieved to have been acknowledged _(he still wants me)_ that he opens for Sam with an ease approaching eagerness. Sam makes a low, hungry noise and pushes even closer, trapping Dean against the doorframe with the weight of his body. Biting at Dean’s lips, he shoves a hand up beneath his t-shirt and scrapes his fingernails over Dean’s right nipple.

Dean moans helplessly into his brother’s mouth and arches his back. He doesn’t know whether he’s terrified or turned on, but it doesn’t really matter anyway because Sam is beyond pissed—Sam is _enraged_ —and he’s going to tear Dean apart without even meaning to.

Except that Sam’s hands are loosening their grip. Sam’s lips are pulling away from his. Sam is stepping back. He stops less than a foot away from Dean and stands there, shaking like a leaf in high winds. His gold irises glitter like stars. His chest rises and falls rapidly. His hands flex. Looking up at him is a little like looking into the eye of an electrical storm: breathtaking and humbling and exhilarating all at once.

After a long, breathless minute, Sam turns away. Freed from his brother’s gaze, Dean shudders. A moment later, the cuffs come unstuck from the wall and he wraps his arms around himself protectively. As if that’s gonna do anything if Sam decides to come at him again.

“Get out of here before I do something we’ll both regret.” It’s nothing more than a whisper, but the sound of his brother’s voice flickers over Dean’s skin like lightning.

He’s on the other side of the door before he knows that he’s moving. It slams shut behind him, hard enough that the ceiling cracks and a small shower of dust rains down. Running a hand through his hair, Dean looks around at the ruined suite and tries to figure out what just happened. Part of him is still caught up with the horrifying knowledge that Sam knows about his attempted cannonball onto the pavement, while the rest of him is still pinned against the wall and being kissed.

“Wake up, asshole,” he mutters, drumming his fingers against one thigh. He can’t afford to be distracted by Sam’s behavior right now, and he sure as hell can’t be thinking about how goddamned good Sam’s mouth felt on his. Not when his brother is undoubtedly in the process of deciding just how many lives Dean’s slip-up is going to cost.

Fuck, there has to be a way to minimize the damage at least. Maybe if he offers—but no. Sam said he didn’t want a whore.

A pulse goes out through the room and Dean hunches over. One of his hands flies to his chest, pressing against his skin like he can smooth out the echoes of his brother’s summons that are reverberating inside of his heart. Eyes wide, he looks from the study door to the suite’s entrance and tries to marshal his thoughts. It’s difficult to think with Sam’s power rattling around inside of him, though: the aftershocks weren’t nearly this bad when Sam summoned Lilith and the yellow-eyed demon yesterday.

He has no clue whether that’s because of the demon’s power inside of him, or because he knows that Sam is calling for children.

 _They’re just kids,_ Dean thinks, and, _He can’t._

But when the door to Sam’s study is abruptly thrown open again and Sam appears in the doorway, he can’t make his voice work well enough to protest.

Sam is stripping off his shirt as he approaches: the set of his jaw not just threatening violence, but promising it. Dean doesn’t actually believe that Sam would deliberately hurt him—not after Sam has passed up on so many opportunities to do so—but he instinctively stumbles back a few steps anyway. Then Sam is there, gripping him by the upper arm and dragging him back toward the study.

“I changed my mind,” Sam says. “You’re waiting in here. After all, there’s no sense in ruining my study when this room is already trashed, right?”

At the sound of a door opening, Dean twists his head around. The sight of the entrance to the suite swinging wide unlocks his voice and he gasps out, “Don’t! Sam, please, I’m sorry, I—”

The air in his mouth hardens, gagging him, and Dean tosses his head frantically. He tries digging his heels in, tries leaning back against his brother, tries wrenching his arm free, and then catches a glimpse of two women over his brother’s shoulder. One of the women has curling, dark hair and is wearing jeans and a halter-top. The other has short, blonde hair and is wearing a simple white shift and a heavy iron collar. She looks about half a heartbeat away from pissing herself.

Distracted by the fact that his brother’s ‘guest’ is an adult, Dean stops fighting and Sam is able to walk him into the study. Halfway over to the armchair, his surprise starts to wear off and he makes one last effort to pull free. Sam doesn’t even need to resort to using his power: he just hooks one foot behind Dean’s ankles and sweeps his feet out from under him. Dean drops heavily into the chair with a grunt. Looks like he can make noises as long as he isn’t trying to talk.

“Stay,” Sam says, and the word echoes in Dean’s head, power-laced. He sprawls obediently in the chair, trying to glare at his brother and well aware that his eyes are probably more pleading than angry.

Sam’s forehead smoothes out as his expression thaws slightly. Crouching down next to one arm of the chair, he strokes a hand through Dean’s hair and cups the side of his face with one broad palm. His eyes are filled with fondness and snarling, tightly leashed rage: a juxtaposition of emotions that Dean thinks would drive any sane man mad. Not that Sam needs any help in that department.

“You probably won’t believe me, but this isn’t a punishment,” he says, and then his lips twitch in something that’s almost a smile. “I know you can’t help being stubborn. You wouldn’t be you if you weren’t.”

With a relief so great it leaves his chest aching, Dean realizes that his brother doesn’t actually know about his fuck up. Sam’s earlier words were nothing more than a coincidence: just a new take on the same, tired, possessive refrain that Dean has been hearing since his brother showed up to collect him after that hellish night in the graveyard. No kids are going to die screaming because of him today.

Not where Dean can see, anyway.

Sam’s hand strokes up the side of his face and back into his hair, where it tightens. Slowly, almost absently, he draws Dean closer. His eyes are restless: flickering in a circuit that runs from Dean’s eyelashes to the line of his jaw to his lips. Leaning forward, he moves to meet Dean and touches their lips together. There isn’t enough contact for Dean to call it a kiss, but Sam doesn’t move. He doesn’t close his eyes. He just crouches there and breathes in and out of Dean’s mouth.

All of those golden flecks in his brother’s irises are mesmerizing. The air he keeps panting into Dean’s mouth tastes like cinnamon and honey. Time spins out, maddening, until Dean wishes that he could move so that he could tip that last centimeter forward and turn this into what Sam so obviously wants it to be.

Then Sam shudders and turns his head to the side. Easing even closer, he buries his face against the curve of Dean’s neck.

“I’m so angry,” Sam whispers. He doesn’t sound angry, though: he sounds desperate. His lips brush against Dean’s skin in a chaste caress and then part. The slick slide of his tongue is anything but chaste: sending little shivers of arousal through Dean’s traitorous body. Sam mouths at his neck for a moment before tilting his head and nudging at the corner of Dean’s jaw. With the same movement, he tugs on Dean’s hair and drags his head up and over.

Sam’s breath ghosts out across Dean’s exposed throat. His free hand snakes up over the arm of the chair and down onto Dean’s thigh. Dean’s stomach gives a half-hearted turn as his cock starts to twitch to life.

“I want you so fucking much,” Sam groans as he slides his hand higher. “You don’t—fuck, I want you so much, and I can’t—I can’t think straight. I can’t. I can’t control myself.”

His fingers brush tentatively against Dean’s half-hard cock through his boxers and then, as it fills out, press down more confidently. As Sam starts to massage him with a slow, circular motion, Dean lets out an involuntary moan.

“God, the things I want to do to you,” Sam whispers, and then bites down on the vulnerable skin at Dean’s throat.

The ache goes deeper than it should, and Dean’s mind flashes on watching the fire through the picture window while Sam stood behind him, suckling on his neck and marking him. That bruise was still there when he looked into the mirror today, although he skimmed over that detail the same way he always skims over the physical evidence of his brother’s attentions. There's no ignoring it now, though: not with Sam’s mouth working wetly over that same patch of skin.

When he finally draws off, teeth scraping against Dean’s flesh in one last drag of sensation, Sam’s eyes are unfocused. He looks dazed, or maybe drugged, but there’s still anger snapping below the surface. He glances down at his hand—at his fingers, which have started to trail suggestively along the slit at the front of Dean’s boxers—and blinks.

“I—” he says, and then frowns. “I just need to—I need to let off a little steam.”

Deliberately, he lifts his hand from Dean’s crotch and closes it on the arm of the chair. Then he unlocks his other hand from Dean’s hair and strokes his knuckles against Dean’s cheek.

“I know you’re a little squeamish, so I want you to stay here, okay?” he says. Although his voice is tender, his eyes are remote again: raging and promising blood. “I shouldn’t be more than an hour, and then we can get some sleep.”

Yeah, right. Like Dean is going to be able to sleep after this.

 _Don’t,_ he tries to plead again, and can’t get the word past the wad of power filling his mouth.

Sam’s knuckles scrape his cheek one last time and then he stands with a pop of his knees. Without pausing, he turns and strides away. A trickle of power swings the door open for him and then, once he’s through, shuts it again.

The invisible gag and restraining command evaporate immediately. Dean blinks, startled, and then shoves up from the chair and sprints for the door. He tries the knob with one hand, pushing, but the door doesn’t so much as rattle in its frame. Cursing, he pulls his hand back and looks down at the knob. The push-button lock hasn’t just been depressed: it’s been melted into the rest of the metal, with only a slight circular dip to show where it used to be. Fuck.

“Sam!” Dean shouts, pounding on the wood with one fist. “Goddamn it, Sam, don’t you do this! We can—we can talk about this, we can—”

From the other side of the door, there’s a sudden, sharp scream of pain. It slices straight through Dean’s stomach and suddenly the numb resignation he felt earlier today seems impossible. God, how could he ever have considered giving up? How could he have considered anything but defiance as a viable option?

“Sam!” he yells again, hoarsely, and kicks the door with one bare foot. It doesn’t do anything, of course—damned thing is made of solid oak—and he abandons the effort immediately. Turning, he scans the study for anything he can use as a battering ram. He considers the lamps for all of a second before dismissing them: he can tell from the fluted twist of the metal that they’re going to crumple before the door gives.

The screaming from the other room has kicked up a notch, so ragged that Dean’s throat burns in sympathy, and he lurches into motion. He’ll tear the room apart if he has to. Fuck, there has to be something in here that he can use.

As he kicks over one of Sam’s book piles, the nameless woman doesn’t just scream but _shrieks_ : a serrated, red sound that slices through Dean’s skin and makes him flinch. He wishes he could say that he has never heard a sound like that before, but he’d be lying. He hears it all the time in his nightmares, when he dreams about the early days After. When he remembers what life was like before Sam realized what his little displays and entertainments were doing to Dean.

In those days, Sam’s hands were almost constantly coated in red: once, in Ohio, he got so carried away with a family of five that his hair was wet and dripping by the time he was done. Not even that slaughter could come close to touching Sam's experiments with his newfound powers, though. Given a choice between watching his brother carve someone up like a turkey with a surgeon’s scalpel and watching Sam peel some poor bastard’s skin from his body in neat, bloody strips with nothing more than a glance, Dean would vote for the scalpel every time.

In the other room, the woman’s screams have started to taper off, which doesn’t necessarily mean that Sam is anywhere close to done. They used to get quiet long before the end, in the old days. If Sam has driven her to that point so quickly, though, it means that he’s playing harder than usual. Dean’s certain that he doesn’t like those implications.

“Come on, come on,” he mutters to himself, and kicks another pile of books over. Fuck, this is going nowhere. “ _Think_ , asshole.”

Gripping his hair with both hands, he turns in a tight circle and then stops, staring at his brother’s desk. _Letter opener,_ he thinks. It’ll be a miracle if he can pop his side of the knob off using something that flimsy as a lever, but it’s at least a plan of action, which is more than he had before.

Three of the four drawers open easily, revealing a few pens and pencils and even a magnifying glass. When he touches the fourth drawer, though, his vision flares with green and pain hooks into his back through the tattoo.

“Fuck,” he spits, jumping back and shaking his head to clear it. The tattoo gives one final warning throb and then falls silent. Dean gives the drawer a wistful look—if Sam doesn’t want him opening it, then whatever's in there would probably be really fucking useful—and then starts shoving papers off the top of his brother’s desk. He might be able to open the drawer given a couple of hours and a handful of Vicodin, but the woman in the other room doesn’t have that kind of time.

She hasn’t screamed for a while now, he realizes, and his heart kicks up a notch. Shit, she could already be dead, she could be spread out all over the room, she could— His hand brushes something smooth and hard and cold.

Pushing a few more papers aside, Dean reveals a fist-sized, round, stone paperweight. It isn’t what he had in mind, but when he glances at the doorknob he thinks that it might have potential anyway. After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

 _Oh God, don’t think about skinning, you moron,_ he tells himself, and then grabs the paperweight and stumbles through the debris back over to the door. He doesn’t bother calling to his brother as he takes aim: Sam isn’t going to listen to him, not unless Dean can get out there and throw himself in between his brother and whatever’s left of the girl.

Swinging the paperweight in a short, hard arc, he connects solidly with the doorknob. The impact sends a painful shockwave up his arm, but it also bends the doorknob askew. As he adjusts for another strike, he braces himself for the inevitable backlash from his brother. The stone strikes the knob a second time without any warning tingle through his back or heat in the cuffs, though: either Sam is too busy to notice what Dean is doing, or he just doesn’t care.

On the fifth blow, the knob finally snaps off and falls to the floor with a metallic thunk. Dean immediately drops the paperweight and steps back. With a grunt of effort, he snaps out a sharp sidekick directly on top of the place the knob used to be and something deep inside the doorframe snaps. Clenching his jaw, he kicks the door again and this time it flies open as the locking mechanism rips from the doorframe.

The smell—shit and piss and blood—hits him before he can make any kind of sense of what he’s seeing. About three feet away from the couch, slightly off-center from the middle of the room, there’s a puddle of blood. Spatters paint the ceiling, and there’s a thicker piece of … something … dangling from one of the shattered overhead lights. More _(thankfully)_ unidentifiable clumps litter the red trail leading from the puddle to the hole that used to be the picture window.

Sam is standing by that hole with his back to Dean. The mutilated mess at his feet isn’t recognizable as anything but meat. Blood drips from his fingertips onto the floor: his arms are red and slick all the way up past his elbows, as though he found a bucket of crimson paint and dipped both hands in.

As Dean stands in the doorway, stunned, his brother slowly turns his head to look over his shoulder. The blood spattered across Sam’s face masks his expression, but Dean can tell that his brother isn’t any calmer because Sam’s eyes are still bright with fury: boiling suns trapped behind thin panes of glass. There aren’t any lights on in the room, Dean realizes: the illumination is coming from the air itself, oversaturated with Sam’s power and bleeding out the excess in a flickering glow.

It’s that flickering that causes the illusion, Dean knows. It has to be the flickering because that pile of meat can’t have moved: no one can be that fucked up and still be alive.

Then it happens again—another twitch going through that ruined meat—and this time Dean’s looking straight at it and can’t explain it away. He opens his mouth and bends forward and brings up the two slices he ate earlier and a thin, clear stream of bile. As he wipes a shaking hand across his chin, his eyes flick back to the horrible tableau by the hole in the wall.

Sam looks back at him for a moment and then, crouching, rummages around in the pile with one huge hand. This time the meat doesn’t just twitch but ripples. _There’s always room for Jell-O,_ Dean thinks absurdly, and then clenches his jaw against another surge of nausea.

Pulling his hand free, Sam stands. He's holding something tightly: fingers closed in a glistening fist. Wordlessly, he tosses the object toward Dean—something small and hard and shining—and when it lands at Dean’s feet, just to one side of the pathetic puddle of vomit, he sees that it’s a tooth.

No, not a tooth: a _fang_.

His mind refuses to process that information for a few, dazed moments and then, when it finally clicks, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. _Not human,_ he thinks. _Not human not human not human._ Then he looks at the undulating meat again and doesn’t know how much that actually matters.

“Do you want another one?”

The unexpected question whips Dean’s head around and he realizes that the dark-haired woman from earlier is still here, sitting on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table. Her eyes are the cool green of mint as she gazes serenely at Sam, but Dean’s pretty sure that there’s black underneath.

Then her question penetrates and Dean jerks his eyes back to his brother. “Sam,” he chokes out.

Sam’s eyes slide slowly from the demon back to him.

“Don’t,” Dean tries. “God, Sam, you don’t have to do this.”

But when his brother nods, Dean knows which one of them he’s answering.

He hears the demon on the couch swing her feet to the floor and get up. Catches sight of the bitch tossing her hair over her shoulder with a flick of her hand as she heads for the door.

Still watching Dean, Sam opens his mouth and says, “Ruby.”

Dean thinks that the name should mean something to him, but he can’t think well enough right now to remember why. From the corner of his eyes, he sees the demon pause and look back inquiringly.

“This time, bring me a hunter,” Sam says, and then pushes the twitching meat out into the night with one foot. There’s a challenge in the way he’s looking at Dean, and bitter satisfaction, and Dean’s hand tightens convulsively on the door.

Not just a human, but a hunter. One of them. Hell, maybe someone that they knew Before. Maybe someone they worked with.

A hot rush of anger floods Dean, making him lightheaded and layering a coppery tang over the acidic aftertaste of vomit in his mouth. His throat works and he can’t force anything out past the fury. Okay, fine. He doesn’t need to talk to beat some fucking sense back into his brother.

Balling his hands into fists, he steps over the puddle of his puke and starts for Sam. He knows, distantly, that his brother is way past the point where getting into a brawl is going to help, but he’s too worked up to care.

Dean hasn’t gone more than a few steps before Sam’s power slams into him, pushing him back into the study and then slamming the door shut on him. As soon as he feels the push lift, he sprints forward again, hitting the door with one shoulder and driving the full weight of his body against it. It doesn’t so much as shudder: locked in place with his brother’s power.

“You’re pissed?” he shouts, pounding one fist against the door. “Fine! Let me out of here: we’ll go a little one on one.”

Sam’s answer comes immediate and flat. “I let you out of there, Dean, and I’m going to bury myself inside that shining light of yours and I’m not going to come out again. Do you understand me?”

Not really, no. Not that it matters. “So?” he calls back. “I’m game. Come on, Sammy: let’s dance.”

Sam laughs. He sounds a little closer. “I can destroy anyone I want, can’t I?” he says. “Just as long as it’s you.”

“I’m the one pissing you off!” Dean yells back, slapping his palm flat against the door and then curling his fingers into a fist again.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re asking for,” Sam says. From the sound of his voice, he’s just on the other side of the door now.

A tiny tremor of unease tightens Dean’s stomach, but he ignores it. Whatever Sam wants to do to him is still gonna be better than whatever Sam wants to do to the hunter he just asked for.

“I can take anything you can dish out,” Dean says.

“No, you can’t,” Sam corrects him.

Before Dean can argue, his brother's power leeches through the wood and pulls him flush against the door. Startled, he lets out a grunt and tries to push back. It’s about as effective as trying to shove his way through solid bedrock.

“I feel so empty.” It’s a whisper, as though they’re kids again: sharing secrets across the space between their beds in the dark. “It’s like there’s this cold, dark place inside of me, and it h-hurts. It hurts so much I can’t—” His voice cuts off on a low, agonized sob that makes Dean’s chest constrict, and then he continues, “It’s Hell, Dean. It’s Hell inside me, all the time. E-everywhere.”

No. That can’t be true. Sam can’t be as miserable as Dean is. He can’t be in pain. That would just be insult to injury. Fuck, Dean’s one consolation in all of this is that Sammy isn’t here; that he doesn’t know; that he’s gone but somehow safe, or at least oblivious.

Dean blinks, dangerously close to crying, and then his eyes widen as phantom hands settle on his body. They move across his chest, and his stomach, and his thighs, and his back, and his throat. There are hands kneading his ass, and hooking into his mouth, and sliding up between his legs. So many hands on him at once, and all of them Sam’s.

“You, though, you burn like a star,” Sam tells him. His voice is stronger again: reverent.

Dean pants into the wood as his brother’s invisible hands, still stroking, sink beneath his skin. His groin heats and he eases his legs wider at the unbearable sensation of Sam rubbing up against his insides. The tattoo on his back stirs, saturating him with pleasurable warmth.

“You’re so bright,” Sam murmurs. “So warm.”

Dean squeezes his eyes shut as a phantom finger trails down his chest to his stomach. His hips give an involuntary twitch.

“You glow, Dean. You shine. When I touch you, I can’t hear the screaming. When I touch you, I can almost … I can almost remember.”

Dean is shuddering, almost as mindless as he was yesterday when the brunt of Lilith’s power was on him. Sam is coiled inside of him, Sam is caressing him and treasuring him and worshipping him, and Dean _wants_. It’s so fucking hard _(pun very definitely intended)_ to remember that his brother’s hands and face are bloodied on the other side of the door.

“R-remember what?” he gasps out, tensing as something that feels like a tongue drags along the lines of the tattoo marking his hipbone. Jesus, he isn’t thinking clearly enough for this conversation.

“What it was like to be human,” Sam answers casually.

“S-Sam,” Dean starts and then chokes on his own spit as his brother’s power suddenly grows thorns. Sam hooks into him in a thousand places, tearing him open, and then sends invasive tendrils into the wounds.

It’s laughable to think that he’s ever been in pain before. Laughable to think that he’s ever felt violated or dirty. Sam isn’t just rubbing up against Dean’s soul anymore: he’s burrowing into it. It isn’t anything like merging with the demon’s power—that was a joining, unwelcome as it was.

Sam isn’t trying to join with him. He doesn’t want to be part of Dean: he wants to possess him. Everywhere. Every _way._

Dean realizes with a creeping, disordered horror that this is only the beginning. Right now, Sam is barely scraping the surface of who he is, like a farmer’s hoe digging into soft loam.

It’s a long way from there to the earth’s core.

“I want to bury myself inside of you,” Sam says again. “Deep as I can go.”

The tendrils push deeper and Dean cries out. His mind is beginning to fragment under the strain. He thinks, wildly, about being fucked while Sam nestles into him like this, and understands that being so thoroughly taken would leave him forever drifting in the cold voids of insanity. Hell, he’s halfway there now.

Then Sam releases him. Dean stumbles backwards on trembling legs, trips on a book and falls on his ass. He doesn’t bother trying to get up again: just curls in on himself, hides his face in his hands, and shakes. He aches deep inside, like Sam found a way to fuck him everywhere at once.

The worst of it isn’t the violation or the pain. It isn’t the sick sense of betrayal weighing him down.

No, the worst part is that there’s a twisted, deviant part of him that actually _liked_ it. Christ, he’s still hard. How the fuck can he still be hard?

“Do you understand now?” Sam asks.

Dean does. He’s at a whole new level of understanding, and the old saying has never been so true: ignorance really is bliss.

“You aren’t ready for that,” Sam tells him. “Not yet. So stop fucking baiting me.”

The screaming starts up again a few minutes later, a man’s voice this time, but Dean doesn’t really notice. He’s too busy trying to wrap his head around his brother’s declaration.

 _You aren’t ready for that._

 _Not yet._


	4. Chapter 4

Turns out having your soul invaded is akin to shattering your leg in three places on your way down a cliff face: it hurts like fuck while it’s happening, but afterwards you can’t really wrap your mind around just how bad it was. Dean isn’t going to be signing up for another round any time soon, of course, but it’s only been three hours and his memories of the experience are already fuzzy.

Actually, he feels pretty steady right now. He isn’t calm—after the last few days, Dean doesn’t think he knows what that word means anymore—but the sound of his brother torturing a series of men and women to death in the next room seems to have burned away the thick fogbanks that have been hedging in his mind. He’s beginning to remember what defiance feels like.

He isn’t stupid enough to think that he’s actually going to win, of course: this newfound strength won’t survive Sam’s next attempt to knock him off balance. But the warm throb of determination in his gut, however fleeting, is still the most comforting emotion Dean has felt since he woke up naked and shackled face down on a table in this goddamned suite.

The main room has been quiet for almost an hour now, and Dean is pretty sure that his brother is done for the night. Of course, he thought that after the second hunter, and the third, and the fourth. Hell, he thought it from hunters five through seven, although by then it wasn’t much more than wishful thinking. This silence feels different, though, and it’s lasted far longer than any of the other pauses.

Besides, Sam has to stop sometime, right?

Resting his head against the back of his brother’s armchair, Dean continues to watch the door. A low thrum of nerves, like the subconscious hum of power lines, makes it impossible to look anywhere else. Although he doesn’t know what to expect when the door opens again, Dean has to admit that there’s a good chance his brother will storm in here just as pissed as he was four hours ago and give him that last, hard shove over sanity’s edge.

Sam has said over and over that he doesn’t want to do that, and Dean believes him. After today, he believes his brother with a horrified, cold certainty. But if Dean has learned anything over the past few months, it’s that Sam’s control over his actions is directly related to his emotional state. In the midst of tonight’s tempest, it isn’t out of the question that Sam will … slip. He would probably never forgive himself, but by then the damage would already be done.

Only yesterday, Dean would have welcomed the escape that insanity offers, but that was before he had to sit here and listen to his brother compose a three-hour-long symphony of pain and suffering. That was before he remembered why he was fighting. Fucked if he’s going to let Sam do this.

His brother doesn’t get to murder the world and dance on its corpse. Not on Dean’s watch.

 _Oh yeah, hero?_ a snide voice asks. _What’re you gonna do about it?_

Dean scrapes his thumbnail against the soft suede of the chair arm. “I’ll figure something out,” he mutters.

He doesn’t actually have a plan, but that doesn’t mean he can’t come up with one if he tries. He may not ever have been the brains of any operation, but he isn’t feeble-minded and he’s still sane, which should give him a leg up on his brother. Coming up with a plan would have been easier if he could have gotten to Bobby, sure, but he’ll manage. He has to.

Straining his ears, Dean catches the low murmur of voices from the other room, and the rustle of some sort of heavy fabric. Either Sam is laying down a drop cloth in preparation of another round, or he really is finished and trying to cover up the mess he made. After a few minutes, the rustling stops. The voices continue a moment longer and then they cease as well.

When the door swings open, Dean clenches his jaw but doesn’t move.

Sam stands in the doorway with darkness at his back. He’s still bare-chested: wearing a low-riding pair of jeans and nothing else. His right hand is curled into a loose fist around something Dean can’t make out from here, but it’s clean, at least. So are Sam’s other hand and his face. His hair curls at the nape of his neck: still wet from what Dean presumes was a shower in another part of the hotel with a functional bathroom. With their furious fires banked, Sam’s eyes are burnt copper discs as they rest on Dean: unflinching and unashamed.

“You finished playing demon yet?” Dean asks after a moment. His newfound anger and determination give the question a backbone of steel.

In the old days, Sam would have flinched at that tone of voice. He would have turned pleading, hurt eyes on Dean and stammered out some kind of excuse. Now, he doesn’t so much as blink as he strides forward.

Dean flicks his eyes down to Sam’s clenched right hand as his brother approaches and the object there resolves into a blindfold. It’s black, same as the inky darkness concealing the main room from view, and made from either satin or silk. Considering Sam’s expensive tastes these days, Dean is gonna have to put his money on silk. When he adds his half-naked brother to the equation, it’s a little like looking at a character from a cheesy romance novel—or maybe the lead stud from a softcore porno.

If you didn’t know where those oversized hands had been.

What they’d been doing.

 _Fabio of the Pit,_ Dean thinks. A surge of appalled amusement grips him at the stray thought and he just can’t help himself.

“Oh, that’s classy,” he quips. “All I need is a matching pair of leopard print cuffs and we’ll be all set.”

Sam steps up between his legs and comes to a stop. The gold in his irises thickens, turning molasses dark. The set of his mouth shifts into a suggestive smirk. As his eyes lower to Dean’s wrists, Dean’s groin tightens reflexively. He follows the line of his brother’s gaze and then quirks his lips in a wry half-smile.

“Guess we’re all set, then,” he mutters, reaching over to his left wrist to adjust the cuff there. Both silver bracelets give a single pulse of warmth at the brush of his fingers and Dean pauses. After a moment, and with deliberate slowness, he puts his right hand back down on the arm of the chair.

Holding the blindfold out, Sam says, “Put this on,”

Dean lets his head drop back against the chair and keeps his hands right where they are. He’s just prolonging the inevitable and he knows it, but he isn’t in the mood to humor his brother. Just looking at the fucking blindfold is making his skin pebble. If Sam wants the damned thing on him, he’s gonna have to hold Dean still and tie it in place himself.

Putting the full weight of resolution in his eyes, Dean looks up at his brother. For a long moment, Sam looks back at him. He’s still holding the blindfold out like some kinky peace offering.

“It’s bad out there, Dean,” Sam says finally. “I don’t want you looking at that sort of thing.”

Dean’s eyes dart to the power-darkened doorway and then back to his brother again. Sam’s expression has undergone one of those rapid weather changes of his, and he looks as earnest as he can manage these days: looks concerned. Dean’s chest gives a funny little clench, and it only pisses him off more.

“Why, you worried it’ll give me nightmares?” he mocks. He isn’t sure which one of them the bitter edge to his voice is meant for, but the tone makes Sam’s mouth tighten.

“Put on the blindfold,” he repeats.

“If you’re so fucking worried about my delicate sensibilities, then maybe you shouldn’t butcher people in our bedroom,” Dean suggests, and immediately curses the lack of filter between his mouth and his brain.

First off: the suite isn’t ‘their’ anything. There is no ‘them’. Second off: putting the word ‘our’ before anything starting with ‘bed’ has got to be the dumbest fucking thing he’s done since selling his soul. If he’s so hot to make that sort of association in his brother’s mind, he might as well skip straight to the chase and lube himself up already.

Miraculously, though, Sam doesn’t seem to notice the slip.

“Stop pissing me off, and I won’t have to,” he says, and adjusts his grip on the strip of silk. “Last time I’ll ask: put the fucking blindfold on.”

“‘Ask’, right,” Dean mutters, and then, as Sam pushes the blindfold toward him, he bats his brother’s hand away. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m just gonna stay in here tonight.”

His heart is beating a little quicker now; his stomach is tight. He knows he’s pushing his luck, but he can’t back down. It isn’t just stubbornness driving him on anymore: it’s fear. If Sam is this worried about the state of the main room, then Dean is _positive_ that he doesn’t want anything to do with it.

Frowning, Sam lets his hand fall back to his side. “You’re tired,” he argues. “You need to sleep.”

“In a bed in the middle of a slaughterhouse. Yeah, thanks, but I think I’ll pass.” The words come out glibly, betraying none of the apprehension tightening Dean’s throat.

Sam’s nostrils give that little flare that used to mean he was either gonna clock Dean one or rip all his clothes off. No telling what it means now, though. Aside from that minute movement, he’s gone completely, eerily still, and it makes the hairs at the back of Dean’s neck prickle.

“Come to bed, Dean.” No mistaking that for anything other than an order.

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s been getting away with mouthing off. Maybe it’s the newfound determination. Maybe he’s just tired enough not to give a shit anymore.

Whatever the reason, Dean gives his brother his widest, most insincere smile, and says, “Go fuck yourself.”

He senses, a moment too late like always, that he’s pushed a little too hard. Sam drops the blindfold, and as the black silk flutters to the floor, power rolls through Dean and leaves his muscles loose and unresponsive. He starts to slump sideways in the chair, only to be caught by his brother’s hands.

“It always has to be the hard way with you, doesn’t it?” Sam mutters. Surprisingly, he doesn’t actually sound upset. Maneuvering Dean up into a better position, he leans in close and rests their cheeks together. His right hand drags through Dean’s hair in a gentle caress.

“Close your eyes, baby,” he whispers, breath wafting out across the shell of Dean’s ear. The words curl inside Dean’s mind and lodge there: implacable.

Dean closes his eyes.

He expects to smell blood and shit when Sam carries him out into the main room, but instead there’s just the cloying smell of roses. The scent is thick enough on the air that Dean can practically feel the petals on his tongue: deliriously soft. It doesn’t make any sense—not after what just happened here—and some of Dean’s hostile fear fades into uncertainty. Uncertainty mounts to confusion when he feels something brush his legs—some thick, rustling piece of fabric, like a drape—and then Sam elbows the cloth aside and lowers him down onto the bed. Dean can hear the fabric falling back into place behind them.

Sam smoothes a hand down Dean’s chest and then lightly touches his jaw and says, “You can open your eyes now.”

Dean does and everything is yellow. Sam’s eyes, first and foremost—Sam’s eyes gentled to the color of birch leaves in autumn—and then, behind his brother, a rising wall of amber fabric that stretches up to the ceiling and blocks Dean’s view of the rest of the room. Even the sheets, fresh and soft beneath his hands, are a rich honey color.

“That’s it,” Sam says. He gives the words the same inflection someone might use to praise their dog, but Dean is used to that enough by now that he only feels a minor pang of annoyance.

As the languor of his brother's power lifts, he glances to his left—in part to have something not Sam to look at, but in part to see just how thoroughly the bed has been cut off from the rest of the room. Turns out that the answer is completely: curtains hem him in on all sides. The amber fabric is pretty opaque, but Dean can still make out flickering points of light on the other side.

It looks like Sam let millions of fireflies loose in the room, or maybe like he dragged the stars down from the sky and fastened them to the outside of the curtains, but Dean guesses it’s just candles. There must be hundreds of them—maybe thousands—and they transform the bed into a warm cocoon of light. It doesn’t take a leap in deductive reasoning to figure out that those candles are also responsible for the rose scent making Dean’s head spin.

If Sam felt that he had to go through all this trouble, then Dean really doesn’t want to know what the rest of the room looks like.

Even with his face turned away, he can feel Sam’s eyes on him, and a moment later his brother’s hand is in his hair. It feels good—of course it feels good: Sam has always known how to touch him—and part of Dean wants to nail his resurrected defiance into its grave with a silver stake and have done with it. God, he’s so fucking tired of fighting.

On the other hand, the screams of Sam’s most recent victims still echo in his mind, making surrender impossible. Besides, Dean never knew when to give up before: no sense in learning now, when it actually matters.

Jerking his head away from Sam’s hand, he fixes his brother with a glare. “What the fuck did you do: paint the room with blood?”

“Things got a little out of hand,” Sam answers casually.

Dean’s glare morphs into a disbelieving stare. “A little out of hand?” he repeats incredulously. “Things get ‘a little out of hand’ when you’re trying to talk to a bunch of rugrats and they decide to run around in circles screaming ‘son of a bitch’ at the top of their lungs in front of Grandma. This is—it’s—Jesus Christ, Sam, I don’t even know what to call this! You—I don’t—I have to _live_ here, you know. It’s not like you can just wreck the fucking room and move me somewhere else.”

Sam flushes and ducks his head. His hands pick at the sheets. “I know,” he says. “I’ll clean it up.”

The fact that Sam thinks that’s anything close to an appropriate response hits Dean low in the gut and leaves him nauseous. Sam can’t actually believe that a little Spackle and a couple of coats of paint are going to fix what he did, can he?

“Sam,” Dean manages after a few seconds. “You can’t. You can’t just _clean this up_. You—all those people, you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

This conversation isn’t going to go anywhere—Dean knows it isn’t because he’s had it before—but he’s just dumb enough to keep trying. “Sam,” he starts, and then sucks in a sharp breath as pleasure spikes through his back. Rolling onto his side away from his brother, he curls in on himself.

“S-Sam,” he tries again—not pushing, just wanting Sam to stop—and the pleasure amps up.

Dean blinks rapidly, trying to focus, but his vision refuses to cooperate, leaving the pinpoints of light on the other side of the curtain wavering and indistinct. Sam’s power continues to flood him, and his cock throbs as it fills in pulses that border on painful. Gasping, he grips the fresh sheet with both hands.

“I _said_ , I don’t want to talk about it.”

Sam’s voice slicks across his skin like oil, and Dean’s lips part on a low, choked groan. The air tastes like gold roses, thick and warm in his mouth, and Sam’s power is fondling his soul, and it feels nothing like earlier. Sam isn’t touching him in anger this time, and he isn’t trying to push his way inside, and _fuck_ , but it feels, it feels like, it feels like _rapture_. Dean’s hips give a single, uncontrollable buck and his cock rubs against the front of his boxers, smearing the soft fabric with precome.

For a moment, the feel of his brother’s hand resting on his back is almost lost amidst those deeper sensations. Then Sam’s power flows together, focusing into a mirroring pressure beneath Dean’s skin, and Dean can’t think about anything else. Sam’s fingers twitch, sending shockwaves through the black lines marking him, and then his hand skirts down Dean’s spine. The pulse of his power trails after and Dean squeezes his eyes shut as his body shifts back without his permission, seeking more contact. Seeking it lower.

“Good boy,” Sam murmurs, tracing down Dean’s spine until his hand is brushing the waistband of his boxers.

Sweating and trembling with the effort of holding himself still, Dean bites his lip and prays that his brother’s hand will lift. Only part of him is praying that Sam will reach just a few inches lower instead.

“Isn’t this better than talking?” Sam whispers, toying with the waistband of Dean's boxers.

The bed creaks as he leans closer, and then he’s biting down on the nape of Dean’s neck. The pressure—soft lips, scrape of teeth—sets off a low throb of pleasure-pain that makes Dean’s groin ache. Arching his back, he lets out a muffled whimper and the pressure of his brother's mouth lessens. Sam's breath ghosts across his saliva-slick skin.

“Not quite the right spot.”

 _No,_ Dean thinks, not sure whether it’s meant as agreement or plea, and then Sam is sliding his hand lower and biting down again.

His fingers curl around Dean’s ass—fingertips pushing in between Dean's thighs—and the power follows. Letting out a hurt sob, Dean spreads his legs and cants his hips back. Having Sam’s power inside him always feels a little bit like sex anyway, but it has never felt like this. Then again, that too-intimate sensation of _SamSammySam_ has never been nestled up against the sensitive nub that leaves Dean mindless and keening when they fuck before either. Dean’s dick is leaking steadily now, making a goddamned mess out of his boxers, but the steady, gentle pressure isn’t quite enough to give him the release he needs.

“Sam,” Dean moans, and Sam growls around his mouthful of skin in response.

The vibrations run down Dean’s spine and into his ass and fucking _hell_ , he can’t take much more of this. Except apparently he can, because Sam’s hand is moving again—clenching and releasing in slow, steady curls—and his power is moving against that shocky, pleasurable place inside of Dean with these rolling licks that have him shaking and humping forward against the mattress and then back against Sam’s hand.

Oh fuck, he’s gonna come. He’s gonna—

“Sam.”

The building pressure inside of Dean hesitates as Sam’s attention drifts. _Please,_ he thinks. _Please please please please—_

“Sam,” the voice calls again.

Growling, Sam lifts his head and then snarls, “What?”

The other voice—a woman’s voice—responds, but Dean doesn’t catch what she says. He’s too busy trying to hold himself still: too busy trying to fight his way free of the molasses-thick pull of pleasure.

Behind him, Sam sighs. His hand lifts and the pulse of his power snuffs out like a candle flame. “I’ll be right back,” he promises, and then the mattress shifts and the curtains rustle and he’s gone.

Despite his brother's absence, Dean’s body is still painfully on edge. All it would take is a few more humps against the mattress, or a quick jerk from one hand. But although Sam hasn’t expressly told him he’s not allowed to take care of himself, Dean knows that his brother is going to be pissed if he comes back and finds him sated. Besides, if Dean jerks off now then it’s as good as a confession that he still wants Sam—wants him even after today’s display and yesterday’s betrayal—and frankly, Dean would rather cut his own balls off.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he searches for something— _anything_ —that will take his mind off just how badly he wants to come. The muted sound of his brother’s voice is as good a distraction as he’s probably going to get, and Dean latches onto it desperately. When he strains himself, he can catch a few words of the conversation—words like ‘delivery’ and ‘guard’, and other things that are probably important but don’t make a lick of sense out of context—and, gradually, the hard edge of need wracking his body blunts. Then Dean hears a name that makes his breath catch.

Bobby Singer.

Sam’s voice. Sam talking about Bobby.

Dean tenses. His fingers dig into the mattress as he tries to mentally prepare himself to push aside the curtain. He doesn’t want to see what’s out there—has already seen enough of Sam’s handiwork to last a thousand lifetimes—but he’s willing to endure the sight in order to hear what’s going on. Before he can move, though, the voices cease. A moment later, a warm current of air flutters over his back.

As the bed dips with his brother’s weight, Dean finally moves: pushing himself up to his hands and knees and crawling over to sit with his back against the headboard at the far side of the bed. His knees come up to his chest without his permission, and although he knows he probably looks all of five years old sitting like that, he doesn’t put them back down again. As flimsy a barrier as they are, they’re better than nothing.

The unashamed hunger in Sam’s eyes tells Dean that his brother wants to follow. Wants to touch and caress and devour. But Sam doesn't move. Instead, he holds himself still and says, “Guess this means you don’t want to pick up where we left off.”

There’re about a hundred different responses Dean can make to that, and as much as he wants to be able to say that they’re all variations on ‘fuck, no’, it wouldn’t be true. Any other time, that sort of realization would have sent him into a tailspin. Lucky for him, though, right now he has more important things to worry about than his steadily eroding resolve.

“What about Bobby?” he demands.

Sam’s eyes immediately hood with lazy innocence. “Who?” he says, settling back on his heels.

The candlelight and the curtains conspire to paint his body with a gold glow: highlighting his hips and stomach muscles with subtle shadows. He’s ticklish there, but when Dean has him naked and sprawled out and is tracing his brother’s hipbones with his tongue, Sam gets too turned on to laugh and is reduced to just twitching and cursing until he shoves Dean off and rolls over on top of him and—

Dean jerks his eyes up, but Sam’s face isn’t much safer. They both know that the innocent confusion is a mask, but as far as masks go, it’s a damned convincing one. Either the light or the angle Sam’s holding his head at makes his eyes look more brown than yellow for once. His hair has started to dry in wisps, curling around his cheekbones and the base of his neck the way it always does at that stage.

For no real reason at all, Dean finds himself remembering the aftermath of a job they did in Rhode Island a couple Novembers ago. Sam got himself dunked pretty good by a longshoreman’s cranky ghost while Dean was busy burning the asshole’s schooner, and when they got back to the motel almost half an hour later, the kid was still shivering and blue-lipped. Dean stripped them both down and then helped his brother get into bed before crawling in after him and wrapping his own body as tightly around Sam’s as he could manage. Eventually, Sam’s lips lost that frozen tint, and he stopped shuddering.

'Better?' Dean asked, whispering in case Sam had already drifted off.

But Sam opened his eyes and gave him a weak smile and then they were kissing.

That night was one of the handful of times Dean ever topped: Sam was too worn out to take point on that one, and they both wanted it—both _needed_ it—too much to settle for a couple of fumbled hand jobs. Afterward, Sam was pliant and lazy in his arms, and smiling, and his hair was in the same, not quite wet, not quite dry, stage as it is now.

Dean remembers carding his hands through his brother’s hair while Sam fell asleep. Remembers kissing his brother’s temple and getting a murmured, 'Love you,' in return. He blinks the memory away and transfers his gaze to the flicker of candles on the other side of the curtain.

“You _know_ who,” he says. “Damn it, Sam, I want to know what you were talking about Bobby for. Is he alri—”

It hits him then. All those hunters Sam butchered tonight, and at least four of them were men, and Bobby’s only a few floors away, so goddamned convenient.

No.

Jesus Christ, _no_.

“He’s fine,” Sam says quickly, and moves closer. This time, Dean senses, the earnestness on his brother’s face is real. “Dean, I told you I wouldn’t. I would never do that to you.”

No mention of not being able to do that to Bobby, Dean notes, despite the fact that the man was just as much a surrogate father to Sam. It shouldn’t take him by surprise, especially considering the fact that just a few months _(years?)_ ago, he was convinced that his brother had already torn Bobby to shreds. Somehow it does, though. Somehow, knowing that he’s the only reason Bobby is still alive—that Sam is keeping Bobby safe specifically for Dean like a carrot on a stick—leaves him feeling sucker punched.

Dean belatedly realizes that Sam is reaching for him with a concerned expression and stiffens. The last thing that he needs right now is to be ‘comforted’ by his brother, but he has nowhere to go except off the side of the bed and out onto the killing grounds. As Sam’s fingertips brush his calf, he shakes his head, shrinking back against the headboard as best as he can.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” he bites out.

Sam’s eyes widen, hurt, and then fall. His shoulders hunch as he puts his hand down on the sheet between them. The corners of his mouth lower into something too pathetic to be called a frown.

Jesus Christ, he looks like Dean just dropkicked his puppy.

Guilt clogs Dean’s chest and throat and he has to clench his jaw to keep down the instinctive apology that threatens to spill from his lips. His skin is crawling where Sam touched him, though, so he tilts his foot to the side and rubs his calf against the sheet to rid himself of the sensation. Fuck, he hates feeling like this: frightened and loathing and devoted and pitying all at once. It’s too confusing. Too exhausting.

Everything was so much simpler when he and Sam were fighting on the same side.

“Bobby’s fine,” Sam repeats after a moment. His voice is grey and subdued. “He wants some books. I said he could have them.”

This time Dean’s heart hears what his ears caught before—hears that Bobby’s still alive and safe—and his stomach unknots. Relaxing slightly against the headboard, he says, “What’s he asking for?”

Sam’s eyes flick back up at the question: narrowed and fox-sharp. He doesn’t look wounded anymore. He looks amused. “Lesser Key of Solomon, the Black Grimoire, couple of other things,” he answers.

Dean can feel the blood draining from his face. The Lesser Key of Solomon isn’t anything he didn’t crack open himself that last, hectic year, but the Black Grimoire is a whole nother kettle of fish. It was on Sam’s must-read list while they were searching for a way out of Dean’s deal, and when none of their normal suppliers could find a copy they finally pulled their heads out of their asses and asked Bobby. Who promptly went thin-lipped and hollow-eyed and said, ‘Got my hands on a copy once. Burnt it a few hours later. And I gotta tell you boys, if I did still have it, I wouldn’t give it to you. There’s some things that you just don’t screw around with and that book’s one of them. Damned thing’s rotten inside. Gets in your head and messes with you.’

Bobby’s word was good enough for Dean on that one—in his experience dark magic was always better left alone, swiftly-approaching deadline or not—but Sam kept looking for the Grimoire anyway. As far as Dean knows, he wasn’t able to find a copy, but of course that was before he had the libraries of Hell at his disposal. And Sam’s a freaking packrat when it comes to books, as the state of his study attests. He probably has half a dozen copies floating around in there.

If the Grimoire is as evil as Bobby said, then it’s pretty much the last thing that Dean wants his brother reading right now, but the thought of the book in Sam’s hands isn’t what’s bothering him.

“Bobby asked for the Grimoire?” he says. There’s always a chance he heard wrong.

“Mm,” Sam agrees. His smile—white gleam of teeth—makes Dean’s heart flutter nervously. “He’s trying to figure out how to stop me.”

The information rattles around in Dean’s head: fragmented and nonsensical. Each piece makes a dreadful kind of sense by itself, but when he tries to put them together nothing fits right. He feels like a child who has been handed a fistful of jigsaw pieces from different puzzles and asked to fit them into a coherent whole.

On the one hand, Bobby is trying to stop Sam. Yeah, okay, Dean gets that—hell, he didn’t expect anything less from the man.

On the other hand, Sam knows what Bobby is up to and he’s still letting him have everything he’s asking for—up to and including the Black Grimoire, which contains some seriously scary shit.

The only explanation that even comes close to making sense is that some small part of Sam actually _wants_ to be stopped, but Dean has been looking for evidence of that—he’s been praying for it—and he hasn’t seen any. Maybe this new Sam is just arrogant enough to underestimate Bobby’s intelligence and resourcefulness? Or maybe he doesn’t have a problem giving Bobby the Grimoire because he already knows that the man isn’t going to find anything.

Dean’s breathing goes shallow at the implications of that thought, which is looking more and more plausible the more he thinks about it. The inside of his mouth has gone cold and dry. He wraps one arm around his knees and drags them closer to his chest, keeping his face still in an effort to hide the desperation choking him.

Sam sees anyway, of course. Sam sees everything these days. His smirk widens and he starts to crawl forward again, muscles flexing in a languid, feline manner. Dean watches him come, too stunned to protest.

“That’s right, Dean,” Sam singsongs. “Bobby can look all he wants and he won’t. Find. A. Thing.”

Sam is hedging Dean in against the headboard now, leaving him nowhere to retreat to, and it makes Dean’s heart beat a little faster. A voice in his head is screaming at him to strike out: to push Sam aside and break for the lesser horror on the other side of the curtains. It’s distant, though: unimportant. Muffled by the porridge-thick, disorienting daze that swaddles him and leaves him staring past his brother with burning, too-wet eyes.

“I can’t be stopped,” Sam whispers. His breath is hot against Dean’s skin. “I can't be _saved_. Not by Bobby. Not by you. This is who I am now, and you’re going to have to accept that.”

Sam’s tongue darts out, moving over Dean’s throat, and Dean barely feels it. The shock deadening his mind has anesthetized his skin as well, leaving him numb. The world seems to have unwound around him: a watch without a battery.

Then Sam’s mouth presses down, latching onto Dean’s Adam’s apple and sucking. Dean swallows and, for a single, sharp moment, the pressure of his brother’s lips against his skin makes the throb of his heart startlingly obvious. His pulse is racing: flickering as rapidly as the candles on the other side of the curtains.

Sam can’t be telling the truth. If he is, then what is Dean fighting for? Who the hell is he holding on for if his little brother is gone for good?

As Sam drags his tongue up Dean’s throat and over his jaw in one smooth motion, Dean’s eyes fall shut. There’s a moment of burning pressure behind his eyelids and then a single tear squeezes out and rolls down his cheek. Crying again. Crying like the pathetic fucking failure he is.

Sam is there immediately: tracing the salty trail with his tongue. Dean wonders in an absent sort of way what his tears taste like to his brother: despair or victory?

“That’s right, Dean,” Sam breathes, and kisses his moist cheek. “This is a one-way ticket. Do not pass go. Do not reclaim one corrupted, polluted soul.”

 _Don’t talk about yourself like that._

The words crawl up the back of Dean’s throat, where the blunt weight of shock causes them to miscarry before he even opens his mouth. He tries to swallow their carcasses and can’t remember how, despite having managed the trick only moments before. Great. Like he doesn't have enough reminders of how trapped in the past he is without that rebuke lingering foul and decaying on his tongue.

Sam has fallen silent again: too occupied mapping out every last centimeter of Dean’s throat with his mouth to do anything else. His body shifts and a moment later he’s forcing Dean’s legs flat on the bed with one hand and resting the other low on his stomach. His fingers move languidly: caressing Dean’s twitching muscles through the laughable protection of his t-shirt.

Reality is still disjointed enough that Dean doesn’t actually know how to do anything but sit there passively. When his brother’s nose bumps the underside of his jaw, he lets the nudge tilt his head back. Sam makes a pleased noise and his mouth gets more insistent: sloppy with desire. Dean’s eyes flutter open at the sound and the ceiling is the wrong color—amber instead of white. It takes him a while to understand that his brother’s cloth cage extends even there, and then a renewed surge of horror jolts some of his drifting thoughts back together.

What the fuck did Sam _do_?

Dean’s brain is rebooting faster now—his whole body is coming back online—and even though he can’t see the blood spatter above him, he knows it’s there. The knowledge leaves him just as shaking and cold as he was that night in the graveyard.

This isn’t his brother: not this insane man, who sometimes seems like a child and sometimes like a monster. Not Samuel Winchester, the Boy King. This isn’t Sammy, but it’s his body, and there has to be a way to get this imposter out and Dean’s Sam back in.

There has to be.

“I d-don’t believe you,” Dean stutters. He wishes that he sounded stronger, but Sam’s hand on his stomach is getting bolder, pushing his shirt up and dragging a teasing fingertip across the skin there, and Sam’s mouth is still busy with Dean’s throat, and Dean was just one wrong word from another fugue state a couple of seconds ago, and he’s lucky he can talk at all.

The thing in Sam’s body chuckles, giving Dean’s throat one final nip before lifting its head. “Think about it, Dean,” it says. “I haven’t lied to you once, have I? Not since I accepted my birthright. What makes you think I’d start now?”

“You’re feeding him false information,” Dean says, and his voice comes out steadier with the new understanding. The Boy King doesn’t move, but the force of its presence eases slightly and Dean is able to look down and meet the thing’s eyes as he continues, “You don’t care what he looks at because you’re leading him in the wrong direction, or—or you’re changing the books before you give them to him.”

The Boy King’s eyes have gone flat and hard, like two chips of tiger’s eye. Unsmiling, it looks back at Dean and doesn’t say anything. Dean flashes back on his marking so many months ago—on this son of a bitch’s final conversation with that nameless tattoo artist—and the unfolding, warm feeling the memory stirs in his chest is either certainty or so close to it that Dean can’t tell the difference.

“There’s always a loophole,” he says.

Heat lightning flickers in the Boy King’s eyes for an instant—anger, sharp and snarling—and then fades. A frown plays over its lips, and the press of its hand against Dean’s stomach eases: uncertain. Something moves deep inside of those dark pupils: some core of doubt _(fear?)_ that Dean doesn’t think the bastard is even aware of. Then its mouth firms again and whatever Dean saw, or thought he saw, is gone.

“Not this time,” it says.

Power loops around Dean’s ankles and drags him down the bed until he’s lying with his head on the pillow instead of sitting on it. He knows what’s coming now—knows that this fucker is going to spend the next few hours moving Sam’s hands all over him—but he doesn’t fight.

“I’m gonna get you back, Sammy,” he whispers instead, willing the words to find his brother. “Just hang on, okay?”

Another rope of power knots around his throat, muting him, and Dean shuts his eyes. He might have to put up with getting pawed, but he isn’t going to watch it happen. Not unless the sick son of a bitch forces him to. The mattress jostles and then dips as the Boy King straddles Dean’s waist and settles down, making itself comfortable. Its hands return to his stomach—to the strip of bare skin that has been exposed by his rucked up t-shirt—and stroke in slow, lazy circles.

“I told you,” it announces. “There’s no going back. Not for me. Do you remember that night? I do. I remember cutting you open and painting my skin with your blood. I remember slitting that girl’s throat. I remember drinking Azazel’s blood—my own free will, Dean, do you know what kind of difference that makes? Do you have any idea?”

 _Not him,_ Dean thinks. _You’re not him._

“Look at me.”

Setting his mouth into a firm line, Dean keeps his eyes shut and turns his face away from that painfully familiar voice.

“Look at me,” the Boy King thunders, and although there’s no power lacing the words, Dean turns his head and looks anyway. He’s too used to obeying that commanding tone to do anything else.

The thing’s hair is hanging in its face: damp and dark. Flames boil in its eyes, turning them incandescent. Behind its broad, bare shoulders, all of the shadows in the room have gathered. As Dean watches, they flare up and out like the negative of wings.

The Boy King looks down at him—looks _through_ him—and says, “You don’t know, Dean. Not at all. You can’t.”

The shadows fold down, reaching for Dean’s skin, and Dean would be running now if he could move. If he was allowed to move. He sucks in a panicked breath as the shadows brush his cheeks, but the contact doesn’t hurt. There’s a brief chill, and the far-off sound of weeping, and that’s it. He can smell feathers on the air: dry and musty.

 **::I didn’t sell my soul, Dean.::**

The words are deposited directly into Dean’s head, mind to mind, and suddenly it’s impossible for him to think of the man above him as anyone else but his brother. No one else feels like that: like comfort and sunlight and worship and love. There’s a new undercurrent to the sensation, of course—like scuttling things and cracked, dirty windows and flaking, rusted knives and screams in the dark—but not even that can disguise the warm devotion at Sam’s core.

Dean liked this conversation a hell of a lot better when he was able to convince himself that he was dealing with something else.

 **::If you sell something,::** Sam continues, **::You can buy it back, or barter for it—hell, you can steal it if you’ve got the balls. But I didn’t sell _anything_.::**

Fuck, Dean has no clue where this is going, but he already knows that he doesn’t want to hear it. Desperation gives him the strength to shake his head despite Sam’s hold, but there’s no dislodging the _(wings)_ shadows brushing his cheeks. There’s no muting his brother’s voice.

 **::I offered my humanity up as a sacrifice. Willingly. And when I drank Azazel’s blood, it was like—like pouring acid on a sugar cube.::**

 _No,_ Dean thinks wildly. He tries to wrest his mind away, only to suck in a hurt breath as Sam wrenches him even closer. His brother’s thoughts are pulsing through him now: leaving wet, maroon streaks in their wake.

 _Don’t,_ Dean pleads. _Don’t say it please Sam I don’t want to can’t hear no God please don’t_

Sam’s voice rolls right over him (into him through him) like a shockwave. **::I felt my soul die.::**

Breakdown.

Disconnect.

It seems to Dean that some sort of cataclysmic event should have accompanied that announcement. More blood from the sky, maybe, or an earthquake. He should be dying. Oh God, he _feels_ like he's dying.

But somehow he's still breathing, and somehow time is still ticking past, and Sam is still talking.

 **::I felt it shrivel up inside of me, and then I opened my mouth and I puked and do you know what it looked like, Dean?::** The corner of Sam’s mouth twitches mirthlessly. **::It looked like a puddle of vomit. My soul, lying there on the ground looking like someone’s puke. And when I tried to touch it, it shriveled up into a pile of foul-smelling ash.::**

Dean’s crying openly now: too broken and raw to do anything else. It feels like someone cut his chest open, reached inside, and squeezed his heart until nothing is left but wet pulp. There are tears on Sam’s face as well, and the shadow wings are trembling. As Sam lets out a harsh sob that bends his back, the power cocooning Dean’s body and constricting his throat loosens. He immediately flails out and grips his brother’s thigh.

“Sam,” he manages. “Jesus Christ, Sammy, how could you?”

“C-couldn’t lose you,” Sam answers. He’s using his real voice again, and Dean is thankful for that because he doesn’t think he could take hearing that much misery and pain mind-to-mind. Hell, he can’t even handle it now because—murderer or not—he’s sitting up and wrapping his arms around his brother’s shoulders and gripping him tight.

“I c-couldn’t lose you,” Sam sobs again, clutching Dean back. The shudders wracking his body are so violent that they have to hurt. “You don’t know what it’s like, in Hell, what they would have done to you, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t let that happen, I—I had to save you and now you won’t even—you won’t touch me—you can’t even stand to l-look at me, you—”

And then Sam isn’t saying anything because Dean’s covering his brother’s mouth with his own.

Sam tastes like salt and sulfur and copper—he tastes like ruin—but Dean doesn’t care. He tightens his arms around his brother as Sam’s lips part for him, pushing his tongue forward and into that hot, familiar mouth. Dean’s still crying—tears running down his cheeks and getting in the way of the kiss—but the shredded, desolate ache in his chest has eased a little. Sam’s revelation isn’t any less shattering—God, his _soul_ —but he survived that, and he’s still here, still with Dean, and if he’s a little mangled he’s still—Jesus Christ, he’s still _Sammy_.

Sam makes a hopeless, moaning sob and pushes forward, shoving Dean back onto the bed. He seizes control of the kiss: forcing his way into Dean’s mouth while Dean retreats before him. Dean lets his mouth open and accommodating and digs his fingernails into the soft skin of his brother’s back. Yes, more of this, he wants more of—

Something is slithering beneath his skin on his back. Something is—is _pushing_ its way through him—something is—something—

The fucking tattoo.

Dean jerks his head to the side and moves his hands to push against his brother’s shoulders. “Wait,” he pants, twisting his shoulders and rubbing his back against the mattress in an attempt to stop the maddening, rippling feeling beneath his skin. “Sam, wait, something’s—”

“Shh,” Sam murmurs in between kisses. “S’okay. Just let it happen.”

Dean doesn’t know if he wants to demand just what the fuck he’s supposed to ‘let happen’ or if he wants to tell Sam to fuck off or if he just wants to scream, but it doesn’t matter anyway. As soon as he opens his mouth, Sam’s tongue is there, fucking in. One of Sam’s hands is in his hair and the other is inching inside of his boxers and Sam’s cock is a hard line against Dean’s hip, and his back, in his back the tattoo is, fuck it’s shifting, it’s _changing_ , and Dean is being dragged right along with it, his insides reordering and snapping into some new, unfamiliar configuration—

“No!” he shouts, and this time when he jerks his face away, he tries to follow with the rest of his body. Sam’s power flares out and clamps down on him before he can go anywhere. Stilled, Dean lies where he is and gasps for breath while the tattoo undulates beneath his back. It doesn’t hurt, but it—it’s sending these weird vibrations through his soul, and it’s fucking with his head, and he doesn’t know what the hell is happening but he wants it to stop.

Oh _fuck_ , does he want it to stop.

“Shh, baby,” Sam whispers, and then kisses the side of Dean’s neck and strokes a hand down his side. “Shh, it’s okay. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

But everything _isn’t_ fine, damn it: not by a long shot. Dean’s back has finally begun to settle down again, yeah, but the damage is already done. He feels … different. It’s too subtle of a change to quantify—fuck, he can’t even tell whether something’s missing or if something new has been added—but that doesn’t make it any better.

Christ, this is a fucking disaster.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” he gasps out.

Sam gives his side a final stroke and then sits up. His cheeks and eyes are still wet, but he’s smiling. Smiling wide and open and free like he hasn’t in a long time.

Dean looks at the shining tracks on his brother’s face and thinks, _crocodile tears_. The accusation doesn’t ring true, though. Some of his brother’s earlier distress was probably feigned, but not all of it. Not completely.

Dean is almost ninety percent sure that he wasn’t maneuvered into this.

“Wasn’t me,” Sam tells him, cupping Dean’s face and swiping his thumbs through the moisture wetting Dean’s skin.

 _Like hell it wasn’t_ , Dean wants to say, but he can taste the truth in his brother’s words. Even worse: now that the razor edge of panic has receded enough for rational thought to creep in, he remembers kissing Sam. Remembers that unexpected, undeniable surge of grieving love. Of acceptance.

Oh god, _Dean_ did this. Somehow, someway, he did this to himself.

Still grinning goofily, like he's moments away from bursting out in one of those dorky, guffawing laughs of his, Sam lifts off of Dean and moves over to kneel at his right. The restraining clench of his power falls away, leaving Dean free to move. Leaving him free to run now that it’s too late.

Fidgeting with badly concealed eagerness, Sam says, “Take your shirt off and turn over.”

Dean realizes that he’s dangerously close to crying again. That dirty feeling is back: like he’s sullied on the inside where it doesn’t show. But this time it’s his own fault.

If you kick a dog often enough, it’ll turn on you, but Dean apparently doesn’t even have that much sense, cause he’s been kicked more often than he can count—has been chained and manhandled and threatened and, oh yeah, had his fucking soul raped—and he still wasn’t able to disengage his heart enough to keep himself safe. To keep himself whole.

He sort of wants to kiss Sam again.

“Fuck,” he mutters.

“Dean,” Sam pushes, hooking the fabric of Dean’s t-shirt with two fingers and giving it a tug. “Come on, man.”

Dean turns his face away from his brother—from the Christmas morning excitement in Sam’s voice—and says, “You want it off so bad, you do it yourself.”

Sam gathers a fistful of the fabric, like he’s thinking about it, and then slowly opens his hand again. “I just want to see how it looks,” he says. “That’s all. I won’t touch you, I promise.”

Dean’s chest clenches—fear, anger, longing—and then relaxes with a dull throb. “Yeah. You will.”

Sure enough, his brother’s hands are already on him again: tugging at his shoulder and hip and trying to get him over onto his side. “C’mon,” Sam urges.

“No,” Dean repeats, resisting.

Sam could just flip him with a surge of power, but he doesn’t. Instead, he stretches out alongside Dean and snuggles close the way he used to back when they were just kids. Back when they were just brothers the same as anyone else.

“Please,” Sam whispers. Draping a hand over Dean’s waist, he pushes the band of Dean’s boxers down a couple of inches so that he can rub at the black line of tattoo curling over Dean’s hipbone.

As usual, the caress sets off a deep ache along the design. For the first time, though, there’s no erotic edge to the sensation. Instead, warmth throbs into Dean’s thoughts from the tattoo: scattering memories everywhere. Sam laughing so hard that soda splurts out his nose; Sam slouched in a cheap motel chair with his nose buried in a book; Sam with his cock buried so far down Dean’s throat that he can’t breathe.

Okay, so maybe it’s still a little about sex.

Dean shakes his head in an effort to clear it and, when that doesn’t work, squares his jaw and does his best to function through the wash of images. “Why’re you so—hot and—and bothered—to see some ink—you designed?” he manages.

Sam scrapes the edge of his nail along the tattoo and for a moment Dean is all of eighteen again: naked and beating off while his kid brother looks on.

“If I tell you, will you let me look?”

Sam’s voice shatters the memory, freeing Dean, and he curls his right hand into a fist tightly enough that it hurts. The pain grounds him: keeps him centered in the now while Sam continues to toy with his marked skin.

“Yeah, sure,” he answers with false lightness. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

Sam moves his head against Dean’s shoulder—shifting into a more comfortable position—and then snorts into his collarbone. “Liar,” he accuses, and his voice is soft and fond. When he speaks again a moment later, though, his words are harder: verging on threatening.

“You know I could make you show me.”

Dean waits for a thrill of fear to wash over him and feels no more than subdued resignation. It always comes down to this in the end—to what Sam wants, rather than what Dean is willing to give—why should now be any different? For some reason, though, Sam still isn’t forcing him. Sam is just lying there waiting for Dean to toss in the towel and do the easy thing.

Dean’s too tired for this shit.

“So why don’t you?” he mutters.

“This is more fun,” Sam answers immediately, like he was waiting for just that question, and then flops over on top of Dean. Putting a hand on either side of Dean’s head, he props himself up and rocks their groins together with a slow, deliberate thrust.

Dean is exhausted, but apart from yesterday’s train wreck of a hand job, it’s been a few months since he got any release, and it’s embarrassing how quickly his cock fills. Biting his lower lip, he turns his head to the side and glares at the curtain. Anything not to see the smug expression in his brother’s eyes.

It isn’t his fault if he’s hard. Not with Sam’s cock pressing against his the way it is.

“Always so fucking stubborn,” Sam chuckles, and then tilts forward so that he can mouth messily at the corner of Dean’s jaw. “You taste so good,” he whispers between kisses. “I want to taste you everywhere. Let me. God, Dean, please. Let me. You love my mouth, baby, remember?”

Dean remembers. He remembers coming back to the room after a three mile jog in the summer heat and sprawling naked on a broken motel mattress while Sam licked him everywhere: lapping up the salt from Dean’s sweat before finally crawling down between his legs and taking his cock in his mouth. He remembers Sam cornering him against a rock in the middle of a lake somewhere on a Washington mountainside and biting and sucking at his nipples until he was squirming and swearing and coming without having his dick touched once.

“Bet I could do that again,” Sam murmurs. “All you need to do is take this—” light tug on his shirt “—off. Think about it, Dean. My mouth. My teeth. My tongue. You remember how good that felt, don’t you, baby? You remember how loud you screamed when you came? Fuck, I thought you were gonna bring the mountain down on us.”

The shrinking part of Dean not caught up in Sam’s rumbling purr—the part that isn’t trying to convince him that he needs to rut up against his brother—realizes with a distant kind of horror that Sam is listening in on his thoughts. There’s a reason why that’s bad—why that’s beyond terrifying—and in a few moments Dean is going to latch onto that reason and the rest of today is going to look like a fucking picnic.

His breath comes faster as fear _(the window)_ yanks him back toward rationality. Unclenching his fist, he digs _(don’t think about)_ his fingers into the mattress, and then _(the window)_ he opens his mouth and blurts, “You missed a spot.”

Sam’s hand flexes and the splotch of blood that Dean spotted—the splotch staining his brother’s hand between his thumb and index finger—brushes against the clean sheets. Sam pushes his torso up again, keeping his groin snug against Dean’s, and then lifts his right hand from the mattress. Out of the corner of his eyes, Dean sees his brother bring his hand up to his mouth. When Sam puts his hand back down, the spot is gone and his skin is glistening with spit.

Jesus Christ.

“Better?” Sam asks, and then his mouth is back on Dean again, his tongue flicking out over Dean’s skin.

Sam butchered seven people tonight, and he tried to bury himself inside Dean’s _soul_ earlier, and his own soul—Sammy’s beautiful, gentle soul—isn’t just gone but dead, _murdered_ , and that goddamned mark on his back—Sam’s mark—has somehow seeped deeper into him—it _changed_ him—and Sam just sucked someone else’s _blood_ off of his hand and now he’s _licking_ Dean, and enough is fucking enough.

Dean moves suddenly, shoving Sam off and then scrambling for the far side of the bed. He gets a hand on the curtain and twitches it aside enough to catch sight of the dripping, flesh-peppered wall beyond _(gobs of meat are actually buried inside the plaster: how the fuck do you_ do _something like that?)_ and then Sam’s power latches onto him and hauls him back. Pushed into a full-blown panic by his brief glimpse of the carnage, Dean kicks out against his brother’s pull. Either Sam isn’t expecting such a violent reaction, or else he’s worn out from his day on the front lines and all the subsequent torturing and grandstanding, because his power falls away and Dean is left grappling with his brother.

Even without any supernatural powers involved, wrestling with Sam is like struggling against a riptide. Dean would always bet on himself in a knockdown fight, but ever since puberty hit and Sam shot up like a weed, his brother has been more than a match for him when it comes to this kind of close, hand-to-hand shit. He makes Sam work for it, though: resorting to a mongrel mixture of Judo, wrestling, and no-holds-barred gouging and scratching. For a few minutes, there’s no sound in the room but the rough panting of their breaths and an occasional grunt from Sam when Dean manages to connect. But Dean is being dragged back toward the center of the bed, slow and sure, and it’s taking him longer and longer to squirm out of the locks Sam keeps putting on him.

“This is ridiculous, Dean,” Sam pants, getting a hold of Dean’s wrist and wrenching his arm up behind his back. “Stop—damn it!—stop fighting me.”

Dean would tell Sam to go to Hell, but he can’t spare the air. Gritting his teeth, he twists and manages to drive his elbow into his brother’s gut. Sam’s breath whooshes out and his hold loosens enough for Dean to yank his wrist free. Reaching forward, he grips the edge of the mattress with one hand and gathers himself for the final pull that will tumble him out into the room.

Then Sam flops down on the back of Dean’s legs, shoves a hand into his boxers and grabs his cock.

Dean isn’t quite out of his mind enough to keep struggling when his dick is in someone else’s fist and he goes still, panting into the sheets. Sam’s grip eases slightly and his fingers move in a caress.

“Let go,” Dean spits.

“Are you going to behave?” Sam asks. He barely sounds out of breath, the son of a bitch: rolling Dean’s cock between his fingers like he’s considering what to do with it.

“Depends,” Dean grits out through clenched teeth. “Does ‘behave’ mean kick your ass?”

Sam chuckles low in his throat. “That’s what I thought.”

The absent movements of his hand settle into a familiar, agonizing rhythm, and Dean should really have been expecting it. If he hadn’t been so immersed in the rush of adrenaline, he would have known where this was going the moment Sam grabbed him. He’s catching on quick enough now, though: it doesn’t take much for his body to shift from ‘fight or flight’ to ‘fuck’.

As his cock starts to fill out, Dean drops his head down onto his outstretched arm and blurts, “Shit.”

Sam laughs again, sounding satisfied and amused, and then eases himself lower down Dean’s body. Dean thinks in a vague kind of way about making another attempt to get off the bed, but Sam is keeping a firm grasp on his cock and it just isn’t feasible. A moment later, warm air brushes the inside of Dean’s upper thigh. He jumps as his brother’s mouth follows: tongue and teeth and lips working together to turn Dean’s groin into a pulsing, hungry mess. When Sam’s thumb rubs across the head of his cock, Dean can’t quite bite back on his moan.

“Gonna come for me, baby?” Sam asks. “Would that calm you down?”

“I thought—I thought you weren’t—gonna fuck me,” Dean stutters. His hips jerk forward without his permission, pushing his cock through the circle of his brother’s hand. No lube, no spit, no come, which means that his skin is catching on Sam’s, but it still feels way better than it should. Then Sam tightens his grip and Dean goes from aroused to _ngh_ in point five seconds.

“This isn’t fucking,” Sam announces, nuzzling his face further between Dean’s legs.

Dean’s thighs tremble for a moment, resisting, and then part. Grunting in approval, his brother noses the fabric of his boxers out of the way and then bites down on the sensitive skin beneath. Dean makes an embarrassing, high-pitched noise as his whole body flushes cold and then hot again.

This may not be fucking, but it’s sure as hell fucked up. God, he shouldn’t be doing this. He sure as fuck shouldn’t be _getting off_ on this. But for some reason, being touched by Sam doesn’t feel as repulsive as it did a few hours ago. Guilt still twists in Dean’s gut, sour and sickening, but it isn’t stopping him from hitching his hips forward.

Sam nuzzles at Dean’s thigh one more time and then lifts his head and says, “Go ahead and tell me to stop. All it takes is a word.”

“L-like you’re guh-gonna listen.”

“I will,” Sam promises in between pressing open-mouthed kisses against Dean’s skin. His voice is honey-smooth. Taunting. “One word, Dean. One. Little. Word.”

It trembles on Dean’s lips and then tumbles away as Sam changes his stroke and drives a sharp cry from his throat instead.

“You aren’t going to say it,” Sam tells him. “You want this too much. You remember how good it feels.”

Dean does. That’s part of the problem. He remembers how wonderful it felt yesterday to get a little release, and he’s been on edge for one reason or another all day. Oh God, he wants to come. He wants to come just as badly as he did before, when Sam’s power was driving him to it.

But there’s no power between them now: just Sam’s hand on his cock, and Sam’s mouth and breath hot between his legs, and the lingering ache of Sam’s earlier attentions in a collar around his neck. Dean is panting: hips moving rhythmically in counterpoint to his brother’s hand. His balls are tight and aching. His cock pulses with every beat of his heart.

He can’t remember what they were arguing about before. Can’t remember why he was so upset.

“That’s it, baby,” Sam urges. “So fucking beautiful like this. Come on. Just let go.”

He sounds aroused, but there’s something else there as well: some slinking, half-concealed darkness that reminds Dean that this isn’t what his brother wants. Not really. It’s a huge step in the right direction, though, and if Dean lets this happen, then it’s going to bring him that much closer to having his soul ripped open and invaded.

He doesn’t let himself think about it. Just lifts his head and opens his mouth and chokes out, “Stop! Fuck, stop!”

Sam’s hand is gone immediately.

Sobbing, Dean rocks his hips forward one more time, rubbing his cock against the mattress, and then forces himself to hold still. His insides are an aching mess. His mind feels burnt and gutted by all the pleasure and fear and anger: his heart is bruised and crumpled. He doesn’t know if the twisting, hollow sensation in his stomach is arousal or nausea.

With infinite gentleness, Sam manhandles him up and over onto his side. Then, curling his body against Dean’s back, he kisses his neck while making soft, reassuring noises. One of his arms comes around Dean’s stomach and holds him close. His other hand buries itself in Dean’s hair. The soothing tendril of power that slips inside of Dean is so slender and fine that he barely notices it.

“Shh,” Sam whispers. “Shh, baby. It’s okay. Shh.”

After a few minutes, or maybe a few years, Dean manages to sort through the chaotic jumble of emotions in his chest enough to stop crying. Several minutes after that, his dick finally starts to soften. He lies there in his brother’s arms with Sam’s power nestled close and comforting inside of him and tries to understand how he got here from this morning.

Yesterday’s clusterfuck figures into this, he knows. So does Sam’s icy reception of him this evening. Sam fucking into his soul. Then those people—having to listen to his brother torturing them. The room destroyed. The bed wrapped in gold and ringed with candlelight. Sam announcing that his soul isn’t missing but dead—and yeah, Dean still hasn’t wrapped his head around that one: he doesn’t think he'll ever be able to manage that trick.

Kissing Sam.

Accepting him, at least a little.

Then the tattoo changing: changing _him_.

How much of that change was in Dean’s head? Is he really any different now from when he woke up this morning? He doesn’t know for sure—can’t actually remember what his head felt like before Sam's mark rearranged itself—but he doesn’t think that his old self would be lying here so calmly in his brother's arms.

“Why did you do that to yourself?” Sam asks when Dean has been quiet for a while. He sounds genuinely puzzled.

Dean would answer if he could, but the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t actually know. Everything is too fucking complicated to sort out right now, and he’s tired. He’s so goddamned tired.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says finally, hoping that Sam doesn’t press him further.

Luckily, Sam remains quiet: carding his fingers through Dean’s hair in a soothing rhythm. Dean submits to the caress, watching the flicker of candlelight from beneath steadily drooping eyelids and letting his mind wander. He thinks of the mess on the other side of the fabric, and of Sam’s earlier anger, and then of the gentleness his brother is showing him now. Sam’s power twines through his thoughts: coaxing him toward sleep.

“Did you really need to do that today?” he mumbles, drowsy.

“Do what?”

Dean’s thoughts are lethargic enough that he has to consider his brother’s question before answering, “Did you need to hurt those people?”

Sam’s hand stills. For a few minutes, it’s silent in the room. With only the steady rhythm of his brother’s breathing behind him and the sluggish current of power inside of him, Dean starts to drift off.

Then Sam says, “I was—I forgot what it was like. Out there. And all day the only thing I could think of was coming home to you. That I was keeping you safe. Then I got here, and you were—” He swallows thickly and then finishes, “I never want to see you like that again, Dean.”

Dean tries to remember what it was like: kneeling in front of the door and waiting for Sam to come back. He can’t manage it. Hopefully, that’s because of exhaustion and not because of any more sinister reason.

“That an order?”

“Is that what it’ll take to stop you from thinking of yourself like that?” Sam answers. His hand has started moving in Dean’s hair again, and Dean tilts his head into the touch. His brother’s power sends a rewarding surge of warmth through him, leaving him limp and content.

“Thinking like what?” he yawns.

“Like a whore.”

Dean wants to say that he _doesn’t_ see himself like that, if only because Sam sounds so unhappy, but he doesn’t know if he can. Actually, he doesn’t know much of anything right now, except that Sam’s arms are warm, and he feels safe for the first time in a long while. His brother’s power is singing to him: some soft, nameless lullaby that he would have found annoying if he were a little more awake.

“I don’t want to mess with you like that,” Sam tells him, “But I will if I have to.” Then, dropping a kiss on Dean’s shoulder, he starts to pull away.

Moving is difficult, but Dean somehow manages it: catching Sam’s hand and holding it in his own. “Where’re you goan?” he slurs.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sam promises. Turning his hand in Dean’s weak grasp, he rubs his thumb across Dean’s wrist. “I just need to get you ready for bed.”

“’M tired,” Dean agrees as he lets his eyes fall the rest of the way shut. “Goan sleep fer a week. Doan wake me up.”

This time, when Sam sits up, Dean lets him. A second later, hands are on his t-shirt: tugging it up and driving a protesting grumble from his parted lips.

“Come on, man. I know you’re tired, but you have to help me a little.”

Sammy’s voice. SamSammySam.

Dean wants to help his brother—anything for Sam, whatever he wants—but his limbs are nothing more than dead weight and he can’t move them. Sam manages anyway because he’s awesome like that, heaving Dean up and working his shirt off. The air is cold against his skin, but Sam’s hands are warm, and the sheet feels butterscotch smooth against his chest and stomach as Sam lays him back down.

His brother’s breath catches audibly behind him, but Dean is too busy snuggling into the pillow to pay much attention. How has he never noticed how awesome this bed is before? Best. Bed. Ever.

Then Sam’s hands are on him, moving over his back in wondering, trembling sweeps, and that feels even better. Memories shuffle through his head like a deck of cards. Blue Punch Buggy No Punch Back in the backseat of the Impala. Teaching Sammy to swim in some rich guy’s pool. Toasting an imp with his brother by his side. Fucking himself open on Sam’s fingers.

Good times.

“God, Dean,” Sam breathes. “You’re so beautiful.”

Dean’s chest pulses warmly with the praise, and his mouth edges up in a smile. He’s too tired to manage words, and he’s more than a little distracted by all the memories, so he settles for humming softly and rubbing the side of his face against the pillow.

“I love you,” Sam whispers, dropping a kiss on Dean’s right shoulder blade.

New memory: rainy April day on Pastor Jim’s floor. Sam had just spent almost an hour with his tongue sticking out while he made sure to color in the lines in the stupid, secondhand coloring book Dad and Pastor Jim had left them with, and now he was pestering Dean to show him how to write his name on it.

“You’re everything good I ever had, Dean,” Sam tells him, pulling him back to the present. “You’re the only good thing left.”

Sam has that the wrong way around, but Dean’s too wiped to correct him. Tomorrow, maybe. Or next week when he wakes up again.

“That’s right, baby,” Sam says. “Go to sleep. I’ll keep you safe.”

His hands are still running over Dean’s skin and sending off little starbursts of memories. Sammy’s first day of school. Bandaging his brother’s scraped knee and mopping up his bloody nose. Kicking the crap out of the bullies who jumped Sammy in the first place.

“No more bad thoughts tonight, okay, Dean? No nightmares.”

 _No nightmares,_ Dean thinks in agreement, and lets sleep pull him under.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He dreams of his brother.

Loving.

Compassionate.

Kind.

In his dreams, Sam’s eyes aren’t yellow anymore, but for some reason they aren’t brown either.

They’re blue.


End file.
